The Sport of Kings

She thought soon all the land would sound like nothing, and no one would know it had once made sounds, that small civilizations had thrived in the grass. It would never register with life again. And what was coming? Concrete. Glassed fronts and sale signs and cash registers. And with it all, people in a torrential surge, carnivorous men and women looking to smear their skin with colors and creams, to bleach their hair, to shave their hides, to cinch themselves breathless in order to think themselves beautiful.

Everything comes from everything and nothing escapes commonality. I am building a house already built, you are bearing a child already born. Everything comes from everything: a single cell out of another single cell; the cherry tree blossoms from the boughs; the hunter's aim from his arm; the rivers from tributaries from streams from falls from springs from wells; the Christ thorns out of the honey locust; a word from an ancient word, this book from many books; the tiny black bears out of their durable mothers tumbling from dark lairs; eightieth-generation wild crab abloom again and again and again; your hand out of your father's; firstborn out of firstborn out of firstborn out of; the weeping willows and the heart leaf, the Carolina, the silky, the upland, the sandbar willows; every tart berry; our work, which disappears; our mothers' whispers, which disappear; every Thoroughbred; every violet; every kindling twig, bone out of bone; also the heat lightborne, the pollen airborne, the rabbits soft and crickets all angles and the glossy snakes from their slithering, inexhaustible mothers, freshly terrible. When you die, you will contribute your bones like alms. More and more is the only law.

The old poets knew all along: the wilderness has an awful tongue, which teaches doubt.

We founded this nation under the illusory notion of independence, that a man’s life is entirely distinct from the life of his neighbor; that the poisons in his water have no bearing on the cleanliness of his neighbor’s water; that the suffering of a laborer has no direct relationship to the purchaser of goods; that animals are objects for sale; that the health of the land is divorced from the health of the collective. We’ve turned freedom from tyranny into freedom from each other.

Father, we are uniquely capable of morality. We must be moral, because we can be moral. He stood very still as the words settled like silt to the floor of his veins. We can snatch from the air the abstractness of numbers, adding and subtracting and making logic from magic, and because we can, we do, and we must. We can build pyramids and sky-piercing towers, so we must. We can wrestle language from our grunting, so we must. We can map our physical mysteries with machines of our own making. We can classify the species of the earth, name every stone and streamlet. We can run a hundred miles, and we can walk on the face of the moon, so we must—and then we must go farther. We can, from the chaos of existence, extract meanings, which do not exist. We can make ourselves philosophers and scientists and priests. We can construct our unnatural civilizations—we can, and therefore we must. To starve our genes is to honor our genes. With fear and loathing we can stand on the necks of our parents and refuse them. We can evolve from simple to complex. We can choose survival of the species over survival of the self. We can say no to nature and form a conspiracy of doves. We are uniquely capable of morality, therefore we must be moral. That is our nature.

What she was coming to realize, but what no woman was allowed to utter aloud, was that there was no guarantee your child would be adequate compensation for the life you gave up to have it. More and more, life looked an awful lot like a hoax perpetrated on women and designated to further men’s lives at the expense of their own.

Sanity begins with knowing your place.

The man’s brow was furrowed, and he said, “Why, I believe forgiveness and love are the same thing. Don’t you?

Language is the charnel house of man.

Because there is hunger. Like any desire, it’s only temporarily satisfied, which calls into question the reliability of satisfaction and whether such a state can be said to exist at all. Anything we eat knows us more intimately than a lover. Not merely the inside of our mouth but the esophagus, stomach, alimentary canal, upper and lower colon, sphincter. Everything we desire, we shit out and leave behind.

If you’re in America and you think Jesus was white, then I’m here to tell you today, you don’t understand the cross and you don’t understand the color. If they string you up, if they hang you from a big old tree, if they ASSASSINATE you in the name of your brothers, then: You. Are. Black. Abraham Lincoln? Cracker most his days, black in the end. Young Brother Emmett? Black. All them dead Jewboys scattered through the Southland? Even them, black. Reverend King? Black. Malcolm? Black. JFK? Black.

Show me the woman that leaves a man some breathing room, acknowledges he might know a thing or two about the human heart, and I’ll show you a rare and happy man.

it just seems like men aren’t interested in knowing women. Even the decent ones. Everything is lonely after the excitement.

What you guys don’t understand about women is a lot. Smart women, they get bored easy. This one here, she’s so much better than the rest, she has to manufacture her own challenge. If she didn’t come from behind, she’d fall asleep on her own goddamn feet.” Greeney