“And so many things get lost. Not just a set of keys or a photograph of your father with his first truck, but the door those keys once opened, the childhood house you long ago walked into, the father who used to carry you on his shoulders high above the crowds at the summer fair, his body now ashes and shards of bone. You hold these things in place on a page, you walk through that door, touch his face and smell the cigarette smoke on his breath and in his shirt, you make things breathe again in words. You feel the lightness of a ghostly touch across your skin. In that small house on the corner, the porch light suddenly comes on.”

“Who but my mother held those small pieces of my childhood? Where would they go when she was gone?”

“Blake took her face in his hands. “You let me touch you. Kiss you. Your skin? It feels like piano keys. My hands know just where to go.”

“and the word lost for a single breath, as I lie against you; I promise everything that ever was will grow alive again: the first man in his sudden ignorance spits a sour apple whole, turns to her, who will be no more than an ache in the bones of his heart, as you are for me; for this breath, in my arms, the rain falling through the moment's light; then let me rest for one day, for the strength to unmake myself; the beasts of the earth and the great whales, to shift continents into oceans, to take down the firmament and blink into the failing light, the failing darkness for a moment's breath, a moment's touch, brushing your heart like this, as all things fall back into themselves, leaving nothing in the beginning but the word.”

“Mom, mom, mom, mom! A yowl rose from my gut, my bowels, my womb, raw as a birth cry but with no hope in it, a maddening howl, a roar, the water a wailing wall shattering around me. Unsyllabled, thoughtless, the cry rose from the oldest cells in my body. I hadn't known grief could be so primal, so crude. The violence shook me. When it stopped, I fell to my knees in the shower, and the water called to the water in me; I wanted to melt, to run down the drain and under the city to the creek and then to the river thirty miles away. Mom, mom, mom, mom!”

“He walks through the house of his past, hoping he'll find the right door, hoping he'll find the key.”

“Someone once said that marriage is like standing in a corridor lined with doors. You go off through your door, he goes through his, but at the end of the day you have to come back to the corridor, touch base, hold hands, because through every door are more doors, and beyond them, more again, and if you both go through too many without coming back to the corridor, you may never find your way back.”