Swimming Home

She was not a poet. She was a poem.

Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely. But you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all.

As much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.

It is dishonest to give me a poem and pretend to want my opinion when what you really want are reasons to live.

... to be forceful was not the same as being powerful and to be gentle was not the same as being fragile...

I have never got a grip on when the past begins or where it ends, but if cities map the past with statues made from bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, as much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.

The young woman was a window waiting to be climbed through. A window that she guessed was a little broken anyway.

Life ia only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll al get home safely.

We're kissing in the rain.' Her voice was hard and soft at the same time. Like the velvet armchairs. Like the black rain inked on his hand.

They would be enchanted beginners all over again, ... . That was the best thing to be in life.

He lifted his arm that had been resting on her shoulders and gazed at the words she had written on his hand. He had been branded as cattle are branded to show whom they belong to. The cold mountain air stung his lips. She was driving too fast on this road that had once been a forest. Early humans had lived in it. They studied fire and the movement of the sun. They read the clouds and the moon and tried to understand the human mind His father had tried to melt him into a Polish forest when he was five years old. He knew he must leave no trace or trail of his existence because he must never find his way home. That was what his father had told him. You cannot come home. This was not something possible to know but he had to know it all the same

This was the rearranged space of yesterday.

I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job, it's the only thing they work hard at.

Has anyone ever actually told you how up yourself you are?

To use the language of a war correspondent, which was, she knew, what Isabel Jacobs happened to be, she would have to say thay Kitty Finch was smiling at her with hostile intent.

play with whatever the day brought in.

Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely.

Next year he would suggest they hire a chalet on the edge of an icy fjord in Norway, as far away from the Jacobs family as possible.

The truth was her husband had the final word because he wrote words and then he put full stops at the end of them. She knew this, but what did his wife know?

I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job. It's the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. The DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems. What do they want their poems to DO? Their depression in the most VITAL thing about them. Their poems are threats. ALWAYS threats. There is no sensation keener or more active than their pain. They give nothing back except their depression. It's just another utility. Like electricity and water and gas and democracy. They could not survive without it.