“Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.”
“Her Lips Are Copper Wire”
whisper of yellow globes
gleaming on lamp posts that sway
like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog
and let your breath be moist against me
like bright beads on yellow globes
telephone the power-house
that the main wires are insulate
(her words play up and down
dewy corridors of billboards)
then with your tongue remove the tape
and press your lips to mine
till they are incandescent”
“Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.”
“If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta.”
“It takes a well-spent lifetime, and perhaps more, to crystalize in us that for which we exist.”
“Happy, Muriel? No, not happy. Your aim is wrong. There is no such thing as happiness. Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them. No one should want to. Perfect joy, or perfect pain, with no contrasting element to define them, would mean a monotony of consciousness, would mean death.”
“Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?”
“You are the most sleepiest man I ever seed.”
“Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering.”
“Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child, Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down.”
“But words is like th spots on dice: no matter how y fumbles em,
there's times when they jes wont
come.”
“But words is like th spots on dice: no matter how y fumbles em, there's times when they jes wont come.”
“Her dress was of some fine, costly stuff. I suggested the park, and then added that the grass might stain her skirt. Let it get stained, she said, for where it came from there are others.”
“Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child, Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down.”
“afternoon and the furniture is all assembled.”
“There is no force in the world better able to alter anything from its course than love.”
“She came very close, and looking into my eyes, she said, “My Jenny,” and then she bent her head and kissed me—here, on the left-hand corner of my mouth. And nobody knows better than I that I couldn’t have felt anything, because Tamsin was a ghost—but nobody but me knows what I felt. And I’ll always know.”
“I think being so passionate about something is a talent in itself.”
“Then like gravity, or maybe like magnets, our lips met again because they had to. And in that touch it felt like I was buried treasure he’d crossed seven seas to claim. I couldn’t feel the edges of my own body anymore; I was melting into his.”
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