God alone knows the fullness of shame, some secret even to myself but for the sensation, arising like black bile on even the most sun-brightened and untroubled of days, that I have wronged a dear friend, disgraced my dignity, or damned my future joy by inaction, or ignorance. It is an invisible substance that contaminates pleasure and corrodes potential. Lie in bed and let your fate come to meet you, comes the whisper of inner weakness. Attempt nothing.

you can always revisit your most terrible moments, because they become terrible prisons, and because you are always inside them.


The horizon is a perfect or nearly perfect circle of which each of us is always the center. like an eye of which we are the pupil and somehow dreadfully deciding what is looked out at.

When he awoke, the bolt of light that he fallen asleep under had swung through the wall and disappeared and the world was dark, and felt tense, as if ashamed, and as if bristling to retort at some unexpected effrontery. He sat up and saw his blue chest tangled with dark hair. It seemed to him that this hair growing out of him might feel itself more living than he did, though perhaps in a smaller way.

"The earth might think that of its issue," so he thought;
"The tangled little lives it quickened and forgot.
Forgot, though those whose lives these are forget them not
They, with neither dread nor consequence, forgotten, rot.
And if so, what sudden seems to earth, to them seems slow
And slow enough to grateful be, and debts invent to owe.

To owe the giver of a gift he never gave!
But if the debt we owe we ever paid,
Would he recognize the child he had made?
Would, in fact, we look alike in form or face?
Might the image, raised from clay, on clay be based?
From dust to dust, and meantime, dust; the human race?

Cruel miracle is birth bethinking us we've souls to save
When in whose image we were made's our muddy grave!"


His chest hair! He brushed it back and forth and laughed and rose to bathe.

One girl, her thoughts swayed slowly in her mind like long-threaded water grasses in a shallow brook, themselves like the hair of sunken buried maidens green but undying. and two friends, one whose thoughts were a Swiss watch of gears and wheels each jointing every other into frenzied activity at the slightest impetus, all constantly straining against inertia; the other whose thoughts were a single mill-wheel churning chaff from wheat in some dark and burdensome unyielding place in his chest, neverendingly, though his very children might be thrown in among the raw undivided stalks of thought and themselves pulverized.

the frightened weather wakes me from a warm night to a cold morning, no fruit on the bough and all fields low to the ground out of season or scorched and cast down, split open, their darkness and sweetness bared to a burning sun making improvised wives out of all crops in the dry dirt of a forsaken latitude.

Carefully I put a handful of vegetable trash in the garbage can. There was a sunny day outside I didn't want and I felt ashamed, like receiving a gift you don't know how to be grateful for.

The cat, white, with a yellow back, ate a broken little lizard on the roof. Her paw was around the lizards head, and she had eaten half its body - the front. There was one little spot of thick blood on the white plaster patio.

A month later, the lizard's black and shrunken head was still there, boring now, but impossible to remove, eyes long since turned glazed and white now gray and shriveled like dried currants or peppercorns in a rattle. Snow came all at once, and buried it, and when it melted in spring, the head was gone also. We were a little sad to see it gone, and said so, and the cat too seemed to be suffering a loss in its own way, staring at the other roofs rather than at the cars and people below, lying in corners when there were rays of sunlight on the rugs, mewling quietly to itself at all times.