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A silent tear slips down my cheek. It strikes me that, with all the cruelties in this world, there is still nothing quite as dangerous as kindness.

It's not that I don't want to be clear; it's that I trust the mystery so much more.

School is an arduous thing. Sure, there are a few who sail through it like a yacht on a breeze, untouched by its breathless cruelty, but the vast majority would agree that it's ghastly.

It's not enough to be happy. You have to be aware of it, and enjoy being happy. It's a subtle distinction, but it's the difference between living and truly being alive.

"In Praise of Mystery: a Poem for Europa"
...
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.

Crow's-Feet
...I'm holding some wild
idea of unity, conviction, like a jar

of pollywogs, so carefully carried,
so full of potential, live, live, I say

quietly to the far, which isn't a jar
but my own pounding invocation,

I am not fading, but becoming
ungovernable. ...

Being more, even a little more, than other people are comfortable with, is seldom easy ... but if we're going to live up to our full humanity ... allowing ourselves to be the most we can be is absolutely necessary.

"The hurting kind"
I have always been too sensitive, a weeper
from a long line of weepers.

I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.

Showing friendship and love to others is downright revolutionary. (Erievo's exploration of Celie in The Color Purple in the face of critics who want her to be more miserable)

Little me was bubbly, chatty, bossy ... and nosy, really nosy. Wanted to know everything, be in everybody's business.

Only the dead can be so constantly present.

"Flood Coming"
The pulled-apart world scatters
its bad news like a brush fire,
the ink bleeds out the day's undoing
and here we are again: alive.
...
Don't run. open your mouth big
to the rising and hope to your god
Your good heart knows how to swim.

Like all women, I had once been expert at negotiating the balance between the demands of courtesy and the demands of expectation. Expectation, which I knew to be a debt that would at some point have to be paid, in one form or another.

I didn't know, then, how a sorrow deferred does not dwindle away but deepens.

"The Feral Troubadour"
The most I can probably aspire to is to be counted among the people who care for the small, the ordinary, the overlooked creatures of the earth. Because I am one, and it appears that I am contented with a glance from a pretty woman and the poetry on a clean bathroom floor.

I just think ... there are now and there always were and there always will be such difficult times in life. So difficult. For me, the way to come to terms is not to look away.

The trust that evolved from that had weight -- an immovable thing, like the hills around us, full of stories they'll never tell and life they'll always nurture.

Their friendship revived and spread roots in the terrain of grief particular to martyrdom, where the anguish of loss mixes with pride, resolve, the desire for vengeance, and camaraderie.

He knew grief carved out a warren that could start to look more comfortable than the above ground world. The Jenkinses were one foot in the warren.

Therein, she thought, lies the unbearable solitude of a lie: you're alone when you tell it, alone when you love it, alone when you try to dismantle it.

Calling this new weapon "a harnessing of the basic power of the universe" was, he knew, horseshit. It was a harnessing of the hubris of men.

"portrait of the alcoholic frozen in a block of ice"
...
it's a long drive into manhood but such a short walk out I spent so long
shocking myself with my own carelessness

Cal Jenkins was born in the spring of 1920 with one leg shorter than the other. Just two inches shorter, but enough to make plenty of things difficult.

"What Seems Like Joy"
how much history is enough history
...
even a lobster climbs away from its shell a few times a life
but every time I open my eyes I find I am still inside myself
each epiphany dull and familiar
...
I just want to be shaken like a flag whipping away its dust

To read is to embrace both the light and darkness in my life, and the lives of others.

Because I'm lacking in many ways, I hope to fill myself with books.
...
Reading may seem useless, but it's what makes us stronger.

Novels don't tell us "how to live" but show us that "it's possible to live in a different way"
...
Something I love about novels is that despite knowing that I'll never get answers, I'm free to ask questions.

I've purchased five online carts in the days since Korgy left. ... they were never really the thing I wanted in the first place. They were just smaller, more attainable things to want. Placeholders for the bigger, insatiable, incorrigible want underneath.

"Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before"
...We all want

the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder,
like the first man to hear a parrot speak), but we live
on an enormous flatness floating between

two oceans. ...

You had to translate his actions, for they were seldom accompanied by words, because his world was a quiet world: a disconnected, fractured space, a puzzle that made him phone me at three o'clock in the morning, asking me for the last piece of the border so he could fill in the sky.