“We walked where the ancient pier juts into the sea.Stood on the rim of the pool, by the circleof black boulders. No one saw we were thereand everyone who had ever been therestood silently in air.Where else do we ever have to go, and why?”

“what twists or rage greater than we could ever guess had savaged skylines, thousands of lives?”

“Where we live in the worldis never one place. Our hearts,those dogged mirrors, keep flashing usmoons before we are ready for them.”

“why are we so monumentally slow?”

“maybe we try too hard to be remembered, waking to the glowing yellow disc in ignorance, swearing that today will be the day, today we will makesomething of our lives. what if we are so busy searching for worth that we miss the sapphire sky and cackling blackbird. what else is missing?maybe our steps are too straight and our paths too narrow and not overlapping. maybe when they overlap someone in another country lights a candle, a coupleresolves their argument, a young man puts down his silver gun and walks away.”

“We dropped our troubles into the lap of the storyteller, and they turned into someone else's.”

“Making a FistFor the first time, on the road north of Tampico,I felt the life sliding out of me,a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.I was seven, I lay in the carwatching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin."How do you know if you are going to die?"I begged my mother.We had been traveling for days.With strange confidence she answered,"When you can no longer make a fist."Years later I smile to think of that journey,the borders we must cross separately,stamped with our unanswerable woes.I who did not die, who am still living,still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,clenching and opening one small hand.”