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two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com"The world was already acting strange millions of years ago.
"Water had its way with rock. Liquid beat solid. Ice is supposed to be obdurate, unyielding, but back then it rippled and flowed. The glacier rode the world, and the world let it change it, like a girl riding her lover and turning his prick to foam. Exactly the way it is today.
"The world was strange from day one. Let there be light, God said, and there was light. There is probably nothing more beautiful and implausible than the world, nothing that makes less sense, the gray bud of the willow, silky and soft, the silk-white throat of the cobra, the wish of nature or humans to subsume all living matter in fire and flood. I will hurt you, hurt you, hurt you, says the world, and then a meadow arches its back and golden pollen sprays forth.
"Everyone prefers to stick with the subject of people, but how shortsighted to leave out the question of how we got here and where we're going.
"At least four glaciers covered Varennes over the past three million years.
"And even then, how beautiful! Rock cased in ice, the sun extracting greens and blues. Though to say everything was more beautiful without people, before people--even to go so far as to imagine after people--is obscene."
--Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place, pg. 12
"In the beginning the Murdocks weren't so much hungry for love as murderous for it, the one partner's wish to devour the other a wish to turn the infuriating recalcitrant other into food and, hence, into the self, going on the assumption so popular back at the time when Andrea and David fell in love that we are what we eat."
--Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place, pg. 51
"The great nave of the church was alive with unspoken wishes; it is this way in all places of human habitation, some of the air thick, some of it thin, unspooling lightly or dark and clotted, a terrible mixture, so sweet and heartbroken that like all human wishing it could make you get down on the cold stone floor of a church (like Sally Edwards) and start crawling, as if we'd never actually got around to getting up on our hind legs in the first place, though getting up did no good, Sally thought, no good, no good at all."
--Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place, pg. 253
"The No-Bamboo Tale"
They did not find me between the joints of a bamboo reed
on the hat of a mushroom, by the moonlight, from the split pit
of a summer peach. And they might have done better
to fish me from underneath a manhole, or unwrap me
like an old hard stick of drugstore gum--but not this,
either. Instead they did a terrible thing: came together
and reproduced, birthed me like any other child
into the commonest rotations of modern times.
A genital baby--no moonbeam. No thunderclap.
Though somehow I remained certain I--like the ancients
with all the power of conviction in my naked palms--
would return to the tacit revolutions of those centuries
when single men might define the naming of years,
believing in the transmogrification of a changeling orphanage!
--Jaida Jones
"Frogless"
The sore trees cast their leaves
too early. Each twig pinching
shut like a jabbed clam.
Soon there will be a hot gauze of snow
searing the roots.
Booze in the spring runoff,
pure antifreeze;
the stream worms drunk and burning.
Tadpoles wrecked in the puddles.
Here comes an eel with a dead eye
grown from its cheek.
Would you cook it?
You would if.
The people eat sick fish
because there are no others.
Then they get born wrong.
This is not sport, sir.
This is not good weather.
This is not blue and green.
This his home.
Travel anywhere in a year, five years,
and you'll end up here.
--Margaret Atwood
"Cartoon Physics, part 2"
Years ago, alone in her room, my mother cut
a hole in the air
& vanished into it. The report hung &
deafened, followed closely by an over-
whelming silence, a ringing
in the ears. Today I take a piece of chalk
& sketch a door in a wall. By the rules
of cartoon physics only I
can open this door. I want her
to come with me, like in a dream of being dead,
the mansion filled with cots,
one for everyone I've ever known. This desire
can be a cage, a dream that spills
into waking, until I wander this city
as a rose-strewn funeral. Once
upon a time, let's say, my mother stepped
inside herself & no one
could follow. More than once
I traded on this, until it transmuted into a story,
the transubstantiation of desire,
I'd recite it as if I'd never told anyone,
& it felt that way,
because I'd try not to cry yet always
would, & the listener
would always hold me. Upstairs the water
channels off you, back
into the earth, or to the river, through pipes
hidden deep in these walls. I told you the story
of first learning to write my own name, chalk
scrawl across our garage door,
so that when my mother pulled it down I'd
appear, like a movie.
--Nick Flynn
"Water had its way with rock. Liquid beat solid. Ice is supposed to be obdurate, unyielding, but back then it rippled and flowed. The glacier rode the world, and the world let it change it, like a girl riding her lover and turning his prick to foam. Exactly the way it is today.
"The world was strange from day one. Let there be light, God said, and there was light. There is probably nothing more beautiful and implausible than the world, nothing that makes less sense, the gray bud of the willow, silky and soft, the silk-white throat of the cobra, the wish of nature or humans to subsume all living matter in fire and flood. I will hurt you, hurt you, hurt you, says the world, and then a meadow arches its back and golden pollen sprays forth.
"Everyone prefers to stick with the subject of people, but how shortsighted to leave out the question of how we got here and where we're going.
"At least four glaciers covered Varennes over the past three million years.
"And even then, how beautiful! Rock cased in ice, the sun extracting greens and blues. Though to say everything was more beautiful without people, before people--even to go so far as to imagine after people--is obscene."
--Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place, pg. 12
"In the beginning the Murdocks weren't so much hungry for love as murderous for it, the one partner's wish to devour the other a wish to turn the infuriating recalcitrant other into food and, hence, into the self, going on the assumption so popular back at the time when Andrea and David fell in love that we are what we eat."
--Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place, pg. 51
"The great nave of the church was alive with unspoken wishes; it is this way in all places of human habitation, some of the air thick, some of it thin, unspooling lightly or dark and clotted, a terrible mixture, so sweet and heartbroken that like all human wishing it could make you get down on the cold stone floor of a church (like Sally Edwards) and start crawling, as if we'd never actually got around to getting up on our hind legs in the first place, though getting up did no good, Sally thought, no good, no good at all."
--Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place, pg. 253
"The No-Bamboo Tale"
They did not find me between the joints of a bamboo reed
on the hat of a mushroom, by the moonlight, from the split pit
of a summer peach. And they might have done better
to fish me from underneath a manhole, or unwrap me
like an old hard stick of drugstore gum--but not this,
either. Instead they did a terrible thing: came together
and reproduced, birthed me like any other child
into the commonest rotations of modern times.
A genital baby--no moonbeam. No thunderclap.
Though somehow I remained certain I--like the ancients
with all the power of conviction in my naked palms--
would return to the tacit revolutions of those centuries
when single men might define the naming of years,
believing in the transmogrification of a changeling orphanage!
--Jaida Jones
"Frogless"
The sore trees cast their leaves
too early. Each twig pinching
shut like a jabbed clam.
Soon there will be a hot gauze of snow
searing the roots.
Booze in the spring runoff,
pure antifreeze;
the stream worms drunk and burning.
Tadpoles wrecked in the puddles.
Here comes an eel with a dead eye
grown from its cheek.
Would you cook it?
You would if.
The people eat sick fish
because there are no others.
Then they get born wrong.
This is not sport, sir.
This is not good weather.
This is not blue and green.
This his home.
Travel anywhere in a year, five years,
and you'll end up here.
--Margaret Atwood
"Cartoon Physics, part 2"
Years ago, alone in her room, my mother cut
a hole in the air
& vanished into it. The report hung &
deafened, followed closely by an over-
whelming silence, a ringing
in the ears. Today I take a piece of chalk
& sketch a door in a wall. By the rules
of cartoon physics only I
can open this door. I want her
to come with me, like in a dream of being dead,
the mansion filled with cots,
one for everyone I've ever known. This desire
can be a cage, a dream that spills
into waking, until I wander this city
as a rose-strewn funeral. Once
upon a time, let's say, my mother stepped
inside herself & no one
could follow. More than once
I traded on this, until it transmuted into a story,
the transubstantiation of desire,
I'd recite it as if I'd never told anyone,
& it felt that way,
because I'd try not to cry yet always
would, & the listener
would always hold me. Upstairs the water
channels off you, back
into the earth, or to the river, through pipes
hidden deep in these walls. I told you the story
of first learning to write my own name, chalk
scrawl across our garage door,
so that when my mother pulled it down I'd
appear, like a movie.
--Nick Flynn
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