I Think We Fall In Love And

I Kept The Fingers Of My Left Hand Crossed All The Time, While On My Right-hand Fingers I Counted Anything At All—steps To The Refrigerator, Seconds On The Clock, Words In A Sentence—to Keep My Head Occupied. The Counting Felt Like Something To Hang On To, As If Finding The Right Numbers Might Somehow Crack The Code On Whatever System Ran The Slippery Universe We Were Moving Through.

If You Live In The Dark A Long Time And The Sun Comes Out, You Do Not Cross Into It Whistling. There's An Initial Uprush Of Relief At First, Then-for Me, Anyway- A Profound Dislocation. My Old Assumptions About How The World Works Are Buried, Yet My New Ones Aren't Yet Operational.there's Been A Death Of Sorts, But Without A Few Days In Hell, No Resurrection Is Possible.

I Don't Have A Copy Of My Books, And The Degree To Which I Never Read Them Is Profound. I Never Look.

I'm Not Nearly Smart Enough Or Imaginative Enough To Tackle The Novel Form. Never Happen.

The Lesson You've Got To Learn Is The Someday You'll Someday Stagger To, Blinking In Cold Light, All Tears Shed, Ready To Poke Your Bovine Head In The Yoke They've Shaped. Everyone Learns This. Born, Everyone Breathes, Pays Tax, Plants Dead And Hurts Galore. There's Grief Enough For Each. My Mother Learned By Moving Man To Man, Outlived Them All. The Parched Earth's Bare (once She Leaves It) Of Any Who Watched The Instants I Trod It. Other Than Myself, Of Course. I've Made A Study Of Bearing And Forbearance. Everyone Does, It Turns Out, And Note Those Faces Passing By: Not One's A God.