Cassandra Smith > Recent Status Updates

“Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.

I dig pits to trap others
and fall in.

I should be suspicious
of what I want.”

“There’s no blocking the speechflow-river-running-
all-carrying momentum that true intimacy is.”

“Paradise on my right, Hell on my left, and the Angel of Death behind.”

“When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools,
dig a way out through the bottom
to the ocean. There is a secret medicine
given only to those who hurt so hard
they can’t hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.”

“A bright weaver’s shuttle flashes back and forth,
east-west, Where-are-we? Ma ku? Maku.
like the sun saying Where are we?
as it weaves with the asking.”

“Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing,
falling up into the bowl of sky.
The bowl breaks. Everywhere is falling everywhere.
Nothing else to do.

Here’s the new rule: break the wineglass,
and fall toward the glassblower’s breath.”

“What do you despise? By this are you truly known.”

“A fish (now listen carefully to me,
And I will show you how to cross this sea)
Will draw you by its breath — a mighty whale,
Vast but invisible from head to tail,
Who deep in solitude delights to swim
And by his breathing draws the world to him.”

“He fell silent as memory of that seeing filled him. No prescient dream, no experience of his life had quite prepared him for the totality with which the veils had been ripped away to reveal naked time.”

“Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife—chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: ‘Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.’”

Do you wrestle with dreams?
Do you contend with shadows?
Do you move in a kind of sleep?
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with trifles.
Victim of your folly.

— Dirge for Jamis on the Funeral Plain