“The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion”

“I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you.Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. Icertainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have laindown together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone,it’s like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I’ve always liked fleshthe colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Haveyou seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye againstyour collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a treeand climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? Youkept saying I don’t know I don’t know, but you did. Right? Don’t shake, you have to be a still bed forme, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word ‘curl,’ such a slowword, you can’t rush it...”

“You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.”

“If I were a cinnamon peelerI would ride your bedand leave the yellow bark duston your pillow.Your breasts and shoulders would reekyou could never walk through marketswithout the profession of my fingersfloating over you. The blind wouldstumble certain of whom they approachedthough you might batheunder rain gutters, monsoon.Here on the upper thighat this smooth pastureneighbor to your hairor the creasethat cuts your back. This ankle.You will be known among strangersas the cinnamon peeler's wife.I could hardly glance at youbefore marriagenever touch you-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.I buried my handsin saffron, disguised themover smoking tar,helped the honey gatherers...When we swam onceI touched you in waterand our bodies remained free,you could hold me and be blind of smell.You climbed the bank and saidthis is how you touch other women the grasscutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.And you searched your armsfor the missing perfume.and knew what good is it to be the lime burner's daughterleft with no traceas if not spoken to in an act of loveas if wounded without the pleasure of scar.You touchedyour belly to my handsin the dry air and saidI am the cinnamonpeeler's wife. Smell me.”

“She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.”

“All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

“You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her...”