Tim Lilburn

“All knowing darkens as it builds. The grass is a mirror that clouds as the bright look goes in. You stay in the night, you squat in the hills in the cave of night. Wait. Above, luminous rubble, torn webs of radio signals. Below, stone scrapers, neck bone of a deer, salt beds. The world is ending.”

“You were chased here by darkness. Listen to the curve of the hills, the guttering voice. The way to anywhere leads through humiliation. There are only animal trails.”

“Snow falls in the Moosewood Sandhills, on ghost burrows, deer woods, in the bone-home, last snow. What does it mean to become nothing? You've dug a cave in the earth, room of knowing, room of tears. It means to place yourself beneath irrational things and know they are without blame. The potato smell of the dark. You've given up.”

“One afternoon, disgusted, bravo, you fall asleep.”

“Dry snow coming down in the hills. Magpies hair-triggered and thuggish in worn trees. A wall has started to fall in you, it will take years to land.”

“Forget, too, the lamb-y, metaphor-male, the groinless, bourgeois Jesus, with his Easter-egg, candy-store-window eyes ogling the cruciform crosspiece of his eyebrows. If you meet such a Christ on the way, kill him. Do you wish to love? Do you wish to love? Leave love. Love nothing. Life is dark; life is dark at the no-place of the shocked heart cut two by the bone-handled, thrice-bladed Word.”