I Cheerfully Refuse

As enemies go, despair has every ounce of my respect.

Better is here. Stay, and make it better.

I am always last to see the beauty I inhabit.

Buttered toast in a sunlit kitchen, a stand of corn and squash out back, a coming reality where sorrow did not draw and quarter them every waking dawn. Is it so much to ask? A three-chord song, a common life? Could we all have that, someday? Could I?

By this time of course reading itself was slipping into shadow. There was a sinuous mistrust of text and its defenders. The country had recently elected its first proudly illiterate president, A MAN UNSPOILT as he constantly bellowed, and this chimp was wildly popular everywhere he went.

Sometimes the devil you know is bad enough to chance the one you don’t.

Lark’s theory of angels was that they are us and we mostly don’t remember.

It’s taken all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.

It is not easy to make a friend let alone lose one.

These thieves and lovers and wandering poets—what big lives they had! I began watching everyone I met for secret greatness.

She said Pastor Leake was a decent man who often mistook his worldview for the world, a common churchman’s error. She said the church was a broken compass. That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.

We sat on low stools under time-darkened timbers, and the steam from our cups rose curling into a sunbeam. I had sailed once with Lark years ago. It sealed us forever, that trip, and also made the sea a thing I loved best at a distance. But safe ashore, who is immune to the warmth of rubbed teak, a gimbled bronze lantern, coffee steam rising in sunlight? I admired Erik. I liked his stories. It felt nice to imagine that I, too, wanted a sailboat. I didn't really. I wanted the twisting steam.

May all hanging judges be judged themselves at last.

Next morning at church the pastor said our beautiful visitor {the Great Comet of 1965} meant war was coming (...). At twelve I was unsure what to make of his sweltering interpretation but noticed a strain of quiet annoyance in my stepmom's demeanor driving home. When I asked about the promised war and how we ought to get ready, she pulled the car over and looked in my eyes. Her kindness has like water over smooth stones. She said Pastor Leake was a decent man who often mistook his worldview for the world, a common churchman's error. She said the church was a broken compass. That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.

I never was anyone's parent, so this rapid expansion of love and terror confounded me.

Lark and I had media once—internet, TV, the vivid suspect world delivered secondhand, ready always to predict our moods and sell us better ones—but we were early abandoners.

That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.

it began to resemble what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.

Words are one way we leave tracks in the world, Sol. Maybe one day you will write a book, like Olaus did, or Molly Thorn. And people will read it, like I've been reading to you. And they will know that you were here, and a little about what you were like.

Those who remained forged a cult of rage.

He felt confusion coming. The world was confused. It was running out of everything, especially future.

We understood the margins where we lived. Some still enjoyed resenting the far-flung coasts for their gleam and influence, but I think we all accepted the grace of the overlooked.

What scares me is the notion we are all one rotten moment, one crushed hope or hollow stomach from stuffing someone blameless in a cage.

The best futures are unforeseen and this keeps being true.

A romantic fears romance is not enough.

began to resemble what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.

You try to occupy this actual world but man there is always a Douglas, always someone ready to fly his pants and call them a flag.

When a flame is lit move toward it.

Who will ransom earth and water? What new son or what new daughter? Who will make of many, one? What new daughter? What new son?