Elizabeth Smart

“The long days seduce all thought away, and we lie like the lizards in the sun, postponing our lives indefinitely.”

“Yesterday from my office window I saw a crippled girl negotiating her way across the street, her shoulders squarely braced. At each jerky movement her hair flew back like an annunciatory angel, and I saw she was the only dancer on the street.”

“he has martyred me, but for no cause”

“I am shot with wounds which have eyes that see a world all sorrow, always to be, panoramic and unhealable, and mouths that hang unspeakable in the sky of blood.”

“It is enough, the now, and though it comes without anything, it gives me everything.With it I can repopulate the world. I can bring forth new worlds in underground shelters while the bombs are dropping above; I can do it in lifeboats as the ship goes down; I can do it in prisons without the guard's permission; and O, when I do it quietly in the lobby while the conference is going on, a lot of states-men will emerge twirling their moustaches, and see the birth blood, and know they have been foiled.Love is strong as death.”

“O where does he stalk like a horse in pastures very far afield? I cannot hear him, and silence writes more terrible things than he can ever deny. Is there a suspicion the battle is lost?Certainly he killed me fourteen nights in succession. To rise again from such slaughter Messiah must indeed become a woman. He said this absence was the mere mechanics of the thing. But It is not the same.”

“My love, why did you leave me on Lexington Avenue in the Ford that had no brakes?It stalled in the traffic and broke down outside her window. She was writing a letter: I love you very much: Careful Now in capitals.That was a different letter.Yes, but I get confused. One day she saw a golden oriel in the orchard. One day she said, Then have your orgy with Blondie, work out your passion on her.I see it all, the poop of burnished gold. If I got angry and made a scene?But No. No.No, I believe you, of course, I believe you for didn't you say I was the one? Yes, you said, Take care of this girl for she is what makes my blood circulate and all the stars revolve and the seasons return.This was my dream, and why I had circles under my eyes this morning at breakfast. Everyone noticed it, and I think one of them sniggered.You don't take much interest in politics, do you? You never read the newspapers? I drank my coffee, but I had a slight feeling of nausea. It's to be expected, I don't mind it at all, it's nothing.My love, are you feeling better?He can't talk, he can only mutter.O my dear, O my dear, drink a little milk, lie down and rest a little. I will comfort you. I can carry love like Saint Christopher. It is heavy, but I can carry it. It's the stones of suspicion I stumble on. Did I say suspicion? No.No. No. It's nothing. I love you. A slight feeling of nausea, that's all.After a while I got out into the open air, and his face was the moon hanging in the snowy branches.”

“Under the redwood tree my grave was laid, and I beguiled my true love to lie down. The stream of our kiss put a waterway around the world, where love like a refugee sailed in the last ship. My hair made a shroud, and kept the coyotes at bay while we wrote our cyphers with anatomy. The winds boomed triumph, our spines seemed overburdened, and our bones groaned like old trees, but a smile like a cobweb was fastened across the mouth of the cave of fate.Fear will be a terrible fox at my vitals under my tunic of behaviour.Oh, canary, sing out in the thunderstorm, prove your yellow pride. Give me a reason for courage or a way to be brave. But nothing tangible comes to rescue my besieged sanity, and I cannot decipher the code of the eucalyptus thumping on my roof.I am unnerved by the opponents of God, and God is out of earshot. I must spin good ghosts out of my hope to oppose the hordes at my window. If those who look in see me condescend to barricade the door, they will know too much and crowd in to overcome me.The parchment philosopher has no traffic with the night, and no conception of the price of love. With smoky circles of thought he tries to combat the fog, and with anagrams to defeat anatomy. I posture in vain with his weapons, even though I am balmed with his nicotine herbs.Moon, moon, rise in the sky to be a reminder of comfort and the hour when I was brave.”

“Swearing invulnerably, I measure mercilessly his shortcomings, and with luxurious scorn, ask who could be ensnared there.”

“Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?”

“I feel helpless, hopeless, too low to call out, too weak to think. Impotent tears dribble down.”

“Do I want to, can I face my own pain alone now? Shock keeps horror at bay. Hands off. Distanced by mist and pride and drink and friends and necessities like food, babies, fires... So the pain sits still, crouching, heavy, occupying all my inside, always, all the time, whatever my outside does.”

“He is mad.I am mad too, with an inward curtain-like madness. A pall.There is no illumination.”

“... I have ceased to care about anything. I have no personal ambition, or even the desire that people call me nice, or pretty, or witty. Nor do I have any use for sensation, nor do I care. Cessation. It is a technical circle, encircling, cycle, of giving the body to be burned, but having no charity.... What can I do? For without love I am truly dead.”

“The page is as white as my face after a night of weeping. It is as sterile as my devastated mind. All martyrdoms are in vain. He also is drowning in the blood of too much sacrifice.Lay aside the weapons, love, for all battles are lost.”

“Perhaps I am his hope. But then she is his present. And if she is his present, I am not his present. Therefore, I am not, and I wonder why no-one has noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury me. For I am utterly collapsed. I lounge with glazed eyes, or weep tears of sheer weakness.All people seem criminally irrelevant. I ignore everyone and everything, and, if crossed or interrupted in my decay, hate. Nature is only the irking weather and flowers crude reminders of stale states of being.”

“I review all I know, but can synthesize no meaning. When I doze, the Fact, the certain accomplished calamity, wakes me roughly like a brutal nurse. I see it crouching inflexibly in a corner of the ceiling. It comes down in geometrical diagonal like lightning.It says, I remain, I AM, I shall never cease to be: your memory will grow a deathly glaze: you will forget, you will fade out, but I cannot be undone.Thus every quarter hour it puts the taste of death in my mouth, and shows me, but not gently, how I go whoring after oblivion.”

“I must spin good ghosts out of my hope to oppose the hordes at my window. If those who look in see me condescend to barricade the door, they will know too much and crowd in to overcome me.”

“I have learned to smoke because I need something to hold onto.”

“Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had some children who were just like all children. And it rained all day.The woman had to skewer the hole in the kitchen sink, when it was blocked up.The man went to the pub every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The other nights he mended his broken bicycle, did the pool coupons, and longed for money and power.The woman read love stories and longed for things to be different.The children fought and yelled and played and had scabs on their knees.In the end they all died.”

“So the price of careless rapture is a twisted history chronicled by envy. You were too busy being. And you are too busy now. You couldn't spare the time to note down a few facts: how the sun and silence poured into the big room with the yellow curtains; how everything was never-ending and expendable. ”

“If I had my wilderness, nature could be my lover. What can I do in the paved streets for my thirsty roots? I waste time. I encourage fools. I slip the vital hours into penny slot machines -- to pass time, to start my stuck wheels only love can oil.”

“The temperament of a dandelion or cosmic preservation. Where does wonder begin?”

“Man is, without doubt, the defacer, the destroyer. But spending at least the last three years in trying to understand the enemy has almost seduced me to his side.”

“Work is the only only only remedy for life: for happiness, for interest, for stability, for security. Hard, willed work. Oh work!”

“April 19And now it is spring. Birds are singing. Wistful notes and jubilant. And bare streets and no need for coats, and skipping ropes and bicycles and a thin new moon.”

“How can I be kind? How can I find bird-relief in the nest-building of day-to-day? Necessity supplies no velvet wing with which to escape. I am indeed and mortally pierced with the seeds of love.”

“No, my advocates, my angels with sadist eyes, this is the beginning of my life, or the end. So I lean affirmation across the cafe table, and surrender my fifty years away with an easy smile. But the surety of my love is not dismayed by any eventuality which prudence or pity can conjure up, and in the end all that we can do is to sit at the table over which our hands cross, listening to tunes from the wurlitzer, with love huge and simple between us, and nothing more to be said.”