Sail Away With Me Quotes

who knows if the moon's a balloon,coming out of a keen city in the sky--filled with pretty people? ( and if you and I should get into it,if they should take me and take you into their balloon, why then we'd go up higher with all the pretty people than houses and steeples and clouds: go sailing away and away sailing into a keen city which nobody's ever visited,where always it's Spring)and everyone's in love and flowers pick themselves

I wish I was away in Ingo Far across the briny sea Sailing over deepest waters Where neither care nor worry trouble me.

To the sea, to the sea! The white gulls are crying, The wind is blowing, and the white foam is flying. West, west away, the round sun is falling, Grey ship, grey ship, do you hear them calling, The voices of my people that have gone before me? I will leave, I will leave the woods that bore me; For our days are ending and our years failing. I will pass the wide waters lonely sailing. Long are the waves on the Last Shore falling, Sweet are the voices in the Lost Isle calling, In Eressea, in Elvenhome that no man can discover, Where the leaves fall not: land of my people forever!

Beyond the East the sunrise, beyond the West the sea, And East and West the wanderlust that will not let me be; It works in me like madness, dear, to bid me say good-by! For the seas call and the stars call, and oh, the call of the sky! I know not where the white road runs, nor what the blue hills are, But man can have the sun for friend, and for his guide a star; And there's no end of voyaging when once the voice is heard, For the river calls and the road calls, and oh, the call of a bird! Yonder the long horizon lies, and there by night and day The old ships draw to home again, the young ships sail away; And come I may, but go I must, and if men ask you why, You may put the blame on the stars and the sun and the white road and the sky!

I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air abot me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.

When I'm all grown up, come what may, I'll build a boat to carry me away

You should have Hugo throw you in the pool." The golem turned his head toward Seth, who shrugged. "Sure, that would be fun." Hugo nodded, grabbed Seth, and, with a motion like a hook shot, flung him skyward. Kendra gasped. They were still thirty or forty feet away from the edge of the pool. She had pictured the golem carrying Seth much closer before tossing him. Her brother sailed nearly as high as the roof of the house before plummeting down and landing in the center of the deep end with an impressive splash. Kendra ran to the side of the pool. By the time she arrived, Seth was boosting himself out of the waster, hair and clothes dripping. "That was the freakiest, awesomest moment in my life!" Seth declared. "But next time, let me take off my shoes.

At fourteen my sister sailed away from me into a place I'd never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.

Andrius turned. His eyes found mine. "I'll see you," he said. My face didn't wrinkle. I didn't utter a sound. But for the first time in months, I cried. Tears popped from their dry sockets and sailed down my cheeks in one quick stream. I looked away. The NKVD called the bald man's name. "Look at me," whispered Andrius, moving close. "I'll see you," he said. "Just think about that. Just think about me bringing you your drawings. Picture it, because I'll be there." I nodded. "Vilkas," the NKVD called. We walked toward the truck and climbed inside. I looked down at Andrius. He raked through his hair with his fingers. The engine turned and roared. I raised my hand in a wave good-bye. His lips formed the words "I'll see you." He nodded in confirmation. I nodded back. The back gate slammed and I sat down. The truck lurched forward. Wind began to blow against my face. I pulled my coat closed and put my hands in my pockets. That's when I felt it. The stone. Andrius had slipped it into my pocket. I stood up to let him know I had found it. He was gone.

...my heart rides the wind and my thoughts sail away - to a land below the horizon where I know you hide from me...

Thus, though I possess nothing, have given away my fortune, camp by the side of all my houses, I can still be blessed with all riches when I choose, set sail at every hour, unknown to despair. There is no country for those who despair, but I know that the sea comes before and after me, and hold my madness ready.

Where am I going? I don't quite know. Down to the stream where the king-cups grow- Up on a hill where the pine-trees blow- Anywhere, anywhere. I don't know. Where am I going? The clouds sail by, Little ones, baby ones, over the sky. Where am I going? The shadows pass, Little ones, baby ones, over the grass. If you were a cloud, and sailed up there, You'd sail on the water as blue as air. And you'd see me here in the fields and say: "Doesn't the sky look green today?" Where am I going? The high rooks call: "It's awful fun to be born at all. Where am I going? The ring-doves coo: "We do have beautiful things to do." If you were a bird, and lived on high, You'd lean on the wind when the wind came by, You'd say to the wind when it took you away: "That's where I wanted to go today!" Where am I going? I don't quite know. What does it matter where people go? Down to the wood where the blue-bells grow- Anywhere, anywhere. I don't know.

Andrius turned. His eyes found mine. I'll see you he said. My face didn't wrinkle. I didn't utter a sound. But for the first time in months I cried. Tears popped from their dry sockets and sailed down my cheeks in one quick stream. I looked away. The NKVD called the bald man's name. Look at me wispered Andrius moving close. I'll see you he said. Just think about that. Just think about me bringing you your drawings. Picture it because I'll be there.

When we got to the marina we saw this beautiful boat named Tara waiting for us. Fredo, Carin, Ryan, Dan, Kenny, Allison, my mom, and me were all together to enjoy that extraordinary day. As the boat pulled away from the city, its skyline vanished into the horizon. The captain took us to this area where we sailed through caves and lush hilly landscapes. All of a sudden, the captain pushed the throttle all the way down and we started bombing across the water like we were in a James Bond movie. Everyone's hair was blowing all over the place, especially the girls'. Of course, mine was perfect (ha,ha), but theirs ended up looking like the worst case of bed head I've seen! It was so funny.

I wanted to travel the world and sail every sea. I wanted to have adventures, to be a hero, to have my tales told in courtyards and street fairs, where perhaps kids who’d grown up like me, with more imagination than means, might be inspired to dream. Where women who were told there was only one sort of respectful life for them could listen to tales of another who’d broken away—and thrived when she’d done so.

The flowers that I left in the ground, that I did not gather for you, today I bring them all back, to let them grow forever, not in poems or marble, but where they fell and rotted. And the ships in their great stalls, huge and transitory as heroes, ships I could not captain, today I bring them back to let them sail forever, not in model or ballad, but where they were wrecked and scuttled. And the child on whose shoulders I stand, whose longing I purged with public, kingly discipline, today I bring him back to languish forever, not in confession or biography, but where he flourished, growing sly and hairy. It is not malice that draws me away, draws me to renunciation, betrayal: it is weariness, I go for weariness of thee, Gold, ivory, flesh, love, God, blood, moon- I have become the expert of the catalogue. My body once so familiar with glory, My body has become a museum: this part remembered because of someone's mouth, this because of a hand, this of wetness, this of heat. Who owns anything he has not made? With your beauty I am as uninvolved as with horses' manes and waterfalls. This is my last catalogue. I breathe the breathless I love you, I love you - and let you move forever.

We both had done the math. Kelly added it all up and... knew she had to let me go. I added it up, and knew that I had... lost her. 'cos I was never gonna get off that island. I was gonna die there, totally alone. I was gonna get sick, or get injured or something. The only choice I had, the only thing I could control was when, and how, and where it was going to happen. So... I made a rope and I went up to the summit, to hang myself. I had to test it, you know? Of course. You know me. And the weight of the log, snapped the limb of the tree, so I-I - , I couldn't even kill myself the way I wanted to. I had power over *nothing*. And that's when this feeling came over me like a warm blanket. I knew, somehow, that I had to stay alive. Somehow. I had to keep breathing. Even though there was no reason to hope. And all my logic said that I would never see this place again. So that's what I did. I stayed alive. I kept breathing. And one day my logic was proven all wrong because the tide came in, and gave me a sail. And now, here I am. I'm back. In Memphis, talking to you. I have ice in my glass... And I've lost her all over again. I'm so sad that I don't have Kelly. But I'm so grateful that she was with me on that island. And I know what I have to do now. I gotta keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?

The spring is not so beautiful there– But dream ships sail away To where the spring is wondrous rare And life is gay. The spring is not so beautiful there– But lads put out to sea Who carry beauties in their hearts And dreams, like me.

I am too old and sad to play," said the boy. "I want a boat that will take me far away from here. Can you give me a boat?" "Cut down my trunk and make a boat," said the tree. "Then you can sail away... and be happy." And so the boy cut down her trunk and made a boat and sailed away. And the tree was happy ... but not really.

Something terrible was clawing up her throat. “I was lucky,” Arin said. “I had you. And a hard head. And the grace of my god.” “Damn your god.” Arin caught her arm above the elbow. She turned to face him. All trace of humor had left his face. His eyes were wide, urgent. “Don’t say that.” “Why not? I can say anything. Anything except what really matters.” “Kestrel, take it back. You’ll offend him.” “Your god risks you.” “He protects me.” “You’re his plaything.” “You’re wrong. He loves me.” Saying those words made him look so alone. He reminded her of sails curved by the wind, full and yet empty at the same time. She found that she was jealous of his god. The sudden jealousy held her so hard in its grip that she couldn’t breathe. “It’s true,” Arin insisted. She saw then that she had hurt him, that his god’s love was all the more precious to him because of his fear that he would find it nowhere else. Her anger rinsed away. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I ask your pardon. His, too.

All that the unsuspecting Bilbo saw that morning was an old man with a staff. He had a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, a silver scarf over which his long white beard hung down below his waist, and immense black boots. "Good morning!" said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat. "What do you mean?" he said. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I wish it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?" "All of them at once," said Bilbo. "And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain." Then Bilbo sat down on a seat by his door, crossed his legs, and blew out a beautiful grey ring of smoke that sailed up into the air without breaking and floated away over The Hill.

Tell the world what scares you the most” says Brandy. She gives us each an Aubergine Dreams eyebrow pencil and says “Save the world with some advice from the future” Seth writes on the back of a card and hands the card to Brandy for her to read. On game shows, Brandy reads, some people will take the trip to France, but most people will take the washer dryer pair.” Brandy puts a big Plumbago kiss in the little square for the stamp and lets the wind lift and card and sail it off toward the towers of downtown Seattle. Seth hands her another, and Brandy reads: Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random useless facts that are all we have left from our education” A kiss and the card’s on it’s way toward Lake Washington. From Seth: When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?” A kiss and it’s off on the wind toward Ballard. Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another. We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.” Interstate 5 snakes by in the distance. From high atop the Space Needle, the southbound lanes are red chase lights, and the northbound lanes are white chase lights. I take a card and write: I love Seth Thomas so much I have to destroy him. I overcompensate by worshipping the queen supreme. Seth will never love me. No one will ever love me ever again. Beandy is waiting to rake the card and read it out loud. Brandy’s waiting to read my worst fears to the world, but I don’t give her the card. I kiss it myself with the lips I don’t have and let the wind take it out of my hand. The card flies up, up, up to the stars and then falls down to land in the suicide net. While I watch my future trapped in the suicide net Brandy reads another card from Seth. We are all self-composting” I write another card from the future and Brandy reads it: When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves” An updraft lifts up my worst fears from the suicide net and lifts them away. Seth writes and Brandy reads. You have to keep recycling yourself”. I write and Brandy reads. Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.” I write and Brandy reads. The one you love and the one who loves you are never ever the same person.

Japhy,' I said out loud, 'I don't know when we'll meet again or what'll happen in the future, but Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned it all. Now comes the sadness of coming back to cities and I've grown two months older and there's all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void God bless them, but Japhy you and me forever we know, O ever youthful, O ever weeping.' Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said 'God I love you' and looked up to the sky and really meant it. 'I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other.' To the children and the innocent it's all the same. And in keeping with Japhy's habit of always getting down on one knee and delivering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the Sierra, and the others in Marin, and the little prayer of gratitude he had delivered to Sean's shack the day he sailed away, as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said 'Thank you, shack.' Then I hadded 'Blah,' with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.

Am I making myself clear, Orrin? I don't regret how I've lived these past few years. I move where I will. I set no appointments. I guard no borders. What landbound king has the freedom of a ship's captain? The Sea of Brass provides. When I need haste, it gives me winds. When I need gold, it gives me galleons." Thieves prosper, thought Locke. The rich remember. He made his decision, and gripped the rail to avoid shaking. "Only gods-damned fools die for lines drawn on maps," said Zamira. "But nobody can draw lines around my ship. If they try, all I need to do to slip away is set more sail.

Here I love you. In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself. The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters. Days, all one kind, go chasing each other. The snow unfurls in dancing figures. A silver gull slips down from the west. Sometimes a sail. High, high stars. Oh the black cross of a ship. Alone. Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet. Far away the sea sounds and resounds. This is a port. Here I love you. Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain. I love you still among these cold things. Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels that cross the sea towards no arrival. I see myself forgotten like those old anchors. The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there. My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose. I love what I do not have. You are so far. My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights. But night comes and starts to sing to me. The moon turns its clockwork dream. The biggest stars look at me with your eyes. And as I love you, the pines in the wind want to sing your name with their leaves of wire. Pablo Neruda

He took a breath. “I want you to stay. I want you to … I want you.” “You want me.” She turned the words over. Gently, she squeezed his hand. “And how will you have me, Kaz?” He looked at her then, eyes fierce, mouth set. It was the face he wore when he was fighting. “How will you have me?” she repeated. “Fully clothed, gloves on, your head turned away so our lips can never touch?” He released her hand, his shoulders bunching, his gaze angry and ashamed as he turned his face to the sea. Maybe it was because his back was to her that she could finally speak the words. “I will have you without armor, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all.” Speak, she begged silently. Give me a reason to stay. For all his selfishness and cruelty, Kaz was still the boy who had saved her. She wanted to believe he was worth saving, too. The sails creaked. The clouds parted for the moon then gathered back around her. Inej left Kaz with the wind howling and dawn still a long while away.

Over and over again I sail towards joy, which is never in the room with me, but always near me, across the way, like those rooms full of gayety one sees from the street, or the gayety in the street one sees from a window. Will I ever reach joy? It hides behind the turning merry-go-round of the traveling circus. As soon as I approach it, it is no longer joy. Joy is a foam, an illumination. I am poorer and hungrier for the want of it. When I am in the dance, joy is outside in the elusive garden. When I am in the garden, I hear it exploding from the house. When I am traveling, joy settles like an aurora borealis over the land I leave. When I stand on the shore I see it bloom on the flag of a departing ship. What joy? Have I not possessed it? I want the joy of simple colours, street organs, ribbons, flags, not a joy that takes my breath away and throws me into space alone where no one else can breathe with me, not the joy that comes from a lonely drunkenness. There are so many joys, but I have only known the ones that come like a miracle, touching everything with light.

The raft finally got here,” he said. Calypso snorted. Her eyes might have been red, but it was hard to tell in the moonlight. “You just noticed?” “But if it only shows up for guys you like—” “Don’t push your luck, Leo Valdez,” she said. “I still hate you.” “Okay.” “And you are not coming back here,” she insisted. “So don’t give me any empty promises.” “How about a full promise?” he said. “Because I’m definitely—” She grabbed his face and pulled him into a kiss, which effectively shut him up. For all his joking and flirting, Leo had never kissed a girl before. Well, sisterly pecks on the cheek from Piper, but that didn’t count. This was a real, full-contact kiss. If Leo had had gears and wires in his brain, they would’ve short-circuited. Calypso pushed him away. “That didn’t happen.” “Okay.” His voice sounded an octave higher than usual. “Get out of here.” “Okay.” She turned, wiping her eyes furiously, and stormed up the beach, the breeze tousling her hair. Leo wanted to call to her, but the sail caught the full force of the wind, and the raft cleared the beach. He struggled to align the guidance console. By the time Leo looked back, the island of Ogygia was a dark line in the distance, their campfire pulsing like a tiny orange heart. His lips still tingled from the kiss. That didn’t happen, he told himself. I can’t be in love with an immortal girl. She definitely can’t be in love with me. Not possible. As his raft skimmed over the water, taking him back to the mortal world, he understood a line from the Prophecy better—an oath to keep with a final breath. He understood how dangerous oaths could be. But Leo didn’t care. “I’m coming back for you, Calypso,” he said to the night wind. “I swear it on the River Styx.

He nodded, took a step away. “I’ll send for you soon. Believe me." “Would my Westley ever lie?” He took another step. “I’m late. I must go. I hate it but I must. The ship sails soon and London is far.” “I understand.” He reached out with his right hand. Buttercup found it very hard to breathe. “Good-by.” She managed to raise her right hand to his. They shook. “Good-by,” he said again. She made a little nod. He took a third step, not turning. She watched him. He turned. And the words ripped out of her: "Without one kiss?” They fell into each other’s arms.

Kaz seemed to be running in the opposite direction, and Inej was nowhere to be found, though that didn’t mean much when it came to the Wraith. She could be hanging from the sails two feet away from him, and he probably wouldn’t know it. “Jesper!” The shout came from far below, and it took a moment for Jesper to realize it was Wylan calling to him. He tried to ignore him, taking aim again. “Jesper!” I’m going to kill that little idiot. “What do you want?” he shouted down. “Close your eyes!” “You can’t kiss me from down there, Wylan.” “Just do it!” “This better be good!” He shut his eyes. “Are they closed?” “Damn it, Wylan, yes, they’re—” There was a shrill, shrieking howl, and then bright light bloomed behind Jesper’s lids. When it faded, he opened his eyes. Below, he saw men blundering around, rendered blind by the flash bomb Wylan had set off. But Jesper could see perfectly. Not bad for a mercher’s kid, he thought to himself, and opened fire.

I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his deck, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were empty bottles- rows and rows of them we had collected for our future shipbuilding. In the closet were more ships- the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over the years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before my death. He smashed that one first. My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched his as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottle, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then he laughed- a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven. He left the room and went down two doors to my beadroom. The hallway was tiny, my door like all the others, hollow enough to easily punch a fist through. He was about to smash the mirror over my dresser, rip the wallpaper down with his nails, but instead he fell against my bed, sobbing, and balled the lavender sheets up in his hands. 'Daddy?' Buckley said. My brother held the doorknob with his hand. My father turned but was unable to stop his tears. He slid to the floor with his fists, and then he opened up his arms. He had to ask my brother twice, which he had never to do do before, but Buckley came to him. My father wrapped my brother inside the sheets that smelled of me. He remembered the day I'd begged him to paint and paper my room purple. Remembered moving in the old National Geographics to the bottom shelves of my bookcases. (I had wanted to steep myself in wildlife photography.) Remembered when there was just one child in the house for the briefest of time until Lindsey arrived. 'You are so special to me, little man,' my father said, clinging to him. Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded seriously and kissed my father's cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. 'Hold still,' my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

My mother once told me that trauma is like Lord of the Rings. You go through this crazy, life-altering thing that almost kills you (like say having to drop the one ring into Mount Doom), and that thing by definition cannot possibly be understood by someone who hasn’t gone through it. They can sympathize sure, but they’ll never really know, and more than likely they’ll expect you to move on from the thing fairly quickly. And they can’t be blamed, people are just like that, but that’s not how it works. Some lucky people are like Sam. They can go straight home, get married, have a whole bunch of curly headed Hobbit babies and pick up their gardening right where they left off, content to forget the whole thing and live out their days in peace. Lots of people however, are like Frodo, and they don’t come home the same person they were when they left, and everything is more horrible and more hard then it ever was before. The old wounds sting and the ghost of the weight of the one ring still weighs heavy on their minds, and they don’t fit in at home anymore, so they get on boats go sailing away to the Undying West to look for the sort of peace that can only come from within. Frodos can’t cope, and most of us are Frodos when we start out. But if we move past the urge to hide or lash out, my mother always told me, we can become Pippin and Merry. They never ignored what had happened to them, but they were malleable and receptive to change. They became civic leaders and great storytellers; they we able to turn all that fear and anger and grief into narratives that others could delight in and learn from, and they used the skills they had learned in battle to protect their homeland. They were fortified by what had happened to them, they wore it like armor and used it to their advantage. It is our trauma that turns us into guardians, my mother told me, it is suffering that strengthens our skin and softens our hearts, and if we learn to live with the ghosts of what had been done to us, we just may be able to save others from the same fate.

Someday I'd like to sail far away again. Think of how much of the world we've left to see!" But then he cocked his head. "Would you mind?" "Not as long as you took me with you." There was that beautiful smile. "Always.

So should I just conjure a boat?” I asked her now. She shrugged. “I’m not the one with magic. Just get over however you think is best.” “I could swim,” I suggested. “Ooh! Or maybe magic up like, a sweet Jet Ski?” I held my hands out in front of me as if I were clutching the handlebars of said sweet Jet Sky. Aislinn watched me for a moment before saying, “Is this what you always do when you’re nervous?” My hands fell back to my sides. “Pretty much.” I turned back to the water. “See, the thing is, I’m pretty sure I could make a boat. But then if I do, do I give it a motor? Or a sail? Or am I expected to row myself all the way-“ “Please be quiet until you think of something.” The words themselves weren’t particularly threatening, but Aislinn had a way of looking at you that made you feel like she was mere seconds away from kicking you in the face.

The Herons! The Herons! The mighty, fighting Herons! No other Brotherband you'll see Is even half as darin' We sailed away from Hallasholm, we had to be real quick, For Kloof had eaten Erak's ax and chewed his walking stick. We sailed across the Stormwite and we struck a mighty storm. We had to wear our woolly caps to keep us nice and warm. We sailed around Cape Shelter and then south to Araluen. We called upon the people there to find out what was doin'. We chased an evil slaver to the market of Socorro. "We can't rescue them tonight," said Hal. "We'll get them out tomorrow." Lydia and the Ranger burned the market to the ground. The rest of us, we freed the slaves then headed out of town. The Herons! The Herons! The mighty, fighting Herons! No other Brotherband you'll see Is even half as darin' The slave master named Mahmel was a nasty kind of thug, So Stiggy dropped a rock and crushed him like a bug. We sailed back to Cresthaven and we set the captives free. King Duncan said, "Well done, my lads, you're just the boys for me. My Ranger Gilan has to go hunt down some assassins So go along with him and give these wicked types a thrashin'." A pirate galley barred our way. We quickly overtook 'em. And Ingvar led the charge aboard to stab and chop and hook 'em. We beat the Tualaghi and the Scorpions as well. The Ranger stuck his saxe into the leader, the Shurmel. When all the assassins threw a fit of wild hysterics, Hal grabbed up the Shurmel's staff and brought it back for Erak. The Herons! The Herons! The mighty, fighting Herons! No other Brotherband you'll see Is even half as darin

The first time I heard the bard reach this part of the story I thought he would sing that you built a new ship and began to sail home. This should be where the story ends, shouldn’t it? But that is not what he sang next. I demanded to know why. Do you not know where Ogygia is, he asked, his blind eyes moistening. I did not know. Why would any Ithacan have heard of such a place? It took you nine days to drift there, if the poet tells it rightly. So after all the danger you endured, after all the risks you took, I have it on good authority from the poet that you have never been further away from me than you are at this moment.

I don’t know what to . . . to think.” There was a horrifying burn of tears crawling up my throat. “This is all overwhelming for you, I imagine. The whole world as you know it is on the brink of great change, and you’re here and don’t even know my name.” The man smiled so broadly, I wondered if it hurt. “You can call me Rolland.” Then he extended a hand. My gaze dropped to it and I made no attempt to take it. Rolland chuckled as he turned and strolled back to the desk. “So, you’re a hybrid? Mutated and linked to him on such an intense level that if one of you dies, so does the other?” His question caught me off guard, but I kept quiet. He sat on the edge of the desk. “You’re actually the first hybrid I’ve seen.” “She really isn’t anything special.” The redhead sneered. “Frankly, she’s rather filthy, like an unclean animal.” As stupid as it was, my cheeks heated, because I was filthy, and Daemon had just physically removed me from him. My pride—my everything—was officially wounded. Rolland chuckled. “She’s had a rough day, Sadi.” At her name, every muscle in my body locked up, and my gaze swung back to her. That was Sadi? The one Dee said was trying to molest Daemon—my Daemon? Anger punched through the confusion and hurt. Of course it would have to be a freaking walking and talking model and not a hag. “Rough day or not, I can’t imagine she cleans up well.” Sadi looked at Daemon as she placed a hand on his chest. “I’m kind of disappointed.” “Are you?” Daemon replied.
 Every hair on my body rose as my arms unfolded.
 “Yes,” she purred. “I really think you can do better. Lots better.” As she spoke, she trailed red-painted fingers down the center of his chest, over his abdomen, heading straight for the button on his jeans. And oh, hell to the no. “Get your hands off him.”
 Sadi’s head snapped in my direction. “Excuse me?”
 “I don’t think I stuttered.” I took a step forward. “But it looks like you need me to repeat it. Get your freaking hands off him.” One side of her plump red lips curled up. “You want to make me?”
 In the back of my head, I was aware that Sadi didn’t move or speak like the other Luxen. Her mannerisms were too human, but then that thought was quickly chased away when Daemon reached down and pulled her hand away. “Stop it,” he murmured, voice dropped low in that teasing way of his. I saw red. The pictures on the wall rattled and the papers on the desk started to lift up. Static charged over my skin. I was about to pull a Beth right here, seconds away from floating to the ceiling and ripping out every strand of red— “And you stop it,” Daemon said, but the teasing quality was gone from his words. There was a warning in them that took the wind right out of my pissed-off sails. The pictures settled as I gaped at him. Being slapped in the face would’ve been better.

Hurston writes. “The white people had held my people in slavery in America. They had bought us, it is true and exploited us. But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. That did away with the folklore I had been brought up on—that the white people had gone to Africa, waved a red handkerchief at the Africans and lured them aboard ship and sailed away.”24

turn to my left and see a young couple walking along the sidewalk.  Seattle’s Alki Beach is pretty much deserted, aside from a few die-hards, or early morning insomniacs, like me.  The young couple are walking away from me, hand in hand, smiling at each other, and I point my lens at them and click.  I zoom in on their sneaker-clad feet and locked hands and shoot some more, my photographer’s eye appreciating their intimate moment on the beach. I inhale the salty air and stare out at the sound once again as a red-sailed boat gently glides out on the water. The early morning sunshine is

How can you say you love me when you’ve never seen me cry? when you’ve never heard the pieces that keep breaking up inside Or when the sky is dark and I’m restless in my bed will you be the one to whisper that the sun will rise ahead? You’ve never seen the battle scars that lay across my skin the price I paid for love, and a joy that grew within Sometimes the weight I carry isn't always feather light will you pick it up and stand up straight, brave against the fight? There's always room for fun and laughs and a beauty to keep warm but I'd never sail away with you if you can’t survive the storm.

Well, if we didn’t sail together, how did you ever—ah, you must have snuck a peek at my luggage labels.” I tried to remain casual, but leaned away as the man drew closer still, inspecting me. The oak countertop dug into my back uncomfortably. He smelled faintly of cloves and cinnamon. “I did nothing of the sort. That would be an impolite invasion of privacy,” the man stated flatly as he picked a bit of lint from my sleeve, tasted it, and tucked it somewhere inside his baggy coat.

You said it was twenty feet!” “Yeah. You’ll have to trust me. Put your arms around my neck and hang on.” “How can you possibly—” “There!” cried a voice behind them. “Kill the ungrateful tourists!” The children of Nyx had found them. Annabeth wrapped her arms around Percy’s neck. “Go!” With her eyes closed, she could only guess how he managed it. Maybe he used the force of the river somehow. Maybe he was just scared out of his mind and charged with adrenaline. Percy leaped with more strength than she would have thought possible. They sailed through the air as the river churned and wailed below them, splashing Annabeth’s bare ankles with stinging brine. Then—CLUMP. They were on solid ground again. “You can open your eyes,” Percy said, breathing hard. “But you won’t like what you see.” Annabeth blinked. After the darkness of Nyx, even the dim red glow of Tartarus seemed blinding. Before them stretched a valley big enough to fit the San Francisco Bay. The booming noise came from the entire landscape, as if thunder were echoing from beneath the ground. Under poisonous clouds, the rolling terrain glistened purple with dark red and blue scar lines. “It looks like…” Annabeth fought down her revulsion. “Like a giant heart.” “The heart of Tartarus,” Percy murmured. The center of the valley was covered with a fine black fuzz of peppery dots. They were so far away, it took Annabeth a moment to realize she was looking at an army—thousands, maybe tens of thousands of monsters, gathered around a central pinpoint of darkness. It was too far to see any details, but Annabeth had no doubt what the pinpoint was. Even from the edge of the valley, Annabeth could feel its power tugging at her soul. “The Doors of Death.

Birthdays are a time when one stock takes, which means, I suppose, a good spineless mope: I scan my horizon and can discern no sail of hope along my own particular ambition. I tell you what it is: I'm quite in accord with the people who enquire 'What is the matter with the man?' because I don't seem to be producing anything as the years pass but rank self indulgence. You know that my sole ambition, officially at any rate, was to write poems & novels, an activity I never found any difficulty fulfilling between the (dangerous) ages of 17-24: I can't very well ignore the fact that this seems to have died a natural death. On the other hand I feel regretful that what talents I have in this direction are not being used. Then again, if I am not going to produce anything in the literary line, the justification for my selfish life is removed - but since I go on living it, the suspicion arises that the writing existed to produce the life, & not vice versa. And as a life it has very little to recommend it: I spend my days footling in a job I care nothing about, a curate among lady-clerks; I evade all responsibility, familial, professional, emotional, social, not even saving much money or helping my mother. I look around me & I see people getting on, or doing things, or bringing up children - and here I am in a kind of vacuum. If I were writing, I would even risk the fearful old age of the Henry-James hero: not fearful in circumstance but in realisation: because to me to catch, render, preserve, pickle, distil or otherwise secure life-as-it-seemed for the future seems to me infinitely worth doing; but as I'm not the entire morality of it collapses. And when I ask why I'm not, well, I'm not because I don't want to: every novel I attempt stops at a point where I awake from the impulse as one might awake from a particularly-sickening nightmare - I don't want to 'create character', I don't want to be vivid or memorable or precise, I neither wish to bathe each scene in the lambency of the 'love that accepts' or be excoriatingly cruel, smart, vicious, 'penetrating' (ugh), or any of the other recoil qualities. In fact, like the man in St Mawr, I want nothing. Nothing, I want. And so it becomes quite impossible for me to carry on. This failure of impulse seems to me suspiciously like a failure of sexual impulse: people conceive novels and dash away at them & finish them in the same way as they fall in love & will not be satisfied till they're married - another point on which I seem to be out of step. There's something cold & heavy sitting on me somewhere, & until something budges it I am no good.

I was born to be a warrior, and I was born to be with her. Tell me how to reconcile the two, because I cannot!" Magnus made no answer. He was looking at Edmund and remembering when he had drunkenly thought of the Shadowhunter as a lovely ship, that might sail straight out to sea or wreck itself upon the rocks. He could see the rocks now, dark and jagged on the horizon. He saw Edmund's future without Shadowhunting, how he would yearn for the danger and the risk. How he would find it at the gaming tables. How fragile he would always be once his sense of purpose was gone. And then there was Linette, who had fallen in love with a golden Shadowhunter, an avenging angel. What would she think of him when he was just another Welsh farmer, all his glory stripped away? Yet love was not something to be thrown aside lightly. It came so rarely, only a few times in a mortal life. Sometimes it came but once. Magnus could not say Edmund Herondale was wrong to seize love when he had found it. He could think Nephilim Law was wrong for making him choose.

The Solitary As one who has sailed across an unknown sea, among this rooted folk I am alone; the full days on their tables are their own, to me the distant is reality. A new world reaches to my very eyes, a place perhaps unpeopled as the moon; their slightest feelings they must analyze, and all their words have got the common tune. The things I brought with me from far away, compared with theirs, look strangely not the same: in their great country they were living things, but here they hold their breath, as if for shame.

Songs are like tattoos You know I’ve been to sea before Crown and anchor me Or let me sail away Hey Blue And there is a song for you Ink on a pin Underneath the skin An empty space to fill in

There was time after that to eat the very fine meal Cymbra and Magda prepared with Rycca's able assistance, to linger over the table as Dragon spun stories, and for lovers to dream the night away in each other's arms. But on the morning tide, while yet a ghostly mist lingered over the water, shouts rang out on the quays, oars slipped into their locks, and sails billowed as a dozen war-armed dragon ships sailed for England.

Perseus, when you're a girl, people think your beauty is their possession. As if it's there for their pleasure, as if they've got something invested in it. They think you owe them for their admiration. Look at your mother and how Zeus behaved to her, breaking through her window. The effort to maintain your outward appearance in order to keep people happy, and the fear if you don't do it, are exhausting. You, on the other hand, can do what you like. You got on your boat and went sailing on a little trip, and no one stopped you. You could take that face of yours away and keep it for the dolphins, if you wanted. Not me. I wasn't allowed.

Once, my grandmama told me a story about her great-grandmama. She'd come across the ocean, been kidnapped and sold. Said her great-grandmama told her that in her village, they ate fear. Said it turned the food to sand in they mouth. Said everyone knew about the death march to the cost, that word had come down about the ships, about how they packed men and women into them. Some heard it was even worse for those who sailed off, sunk into the far. Because that's what it looked like when the ship crossed the horizon: like the ship sailed off and sunk, bit by bit, into the water. Her grandmama said they never went out at night, and even in the day, they stayed in the shadows of they houses. But still, they came for her. Kidnapped her here, and she learned the boats didn't sink to some watery place, sailed by white ghosts. She learned that bad things happened on that ship, all the way until it docked. That her skin grew around the chains. That her mouth shaped to the muzzle. That she was made into an animal under the hot, bright sky, the same sky the rest of her family was under, somewhere far aways, in another world. I knew what that was, to be made a animal.

Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day - very much such a sweetness as this - I struck my first whale - a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty - forty - forty years ago! - ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! - when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before - and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare - fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul - when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts - away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow - wife? wife? - rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey - more a demon than a man! - aye, aye! what a forty years' fool - fool - old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God! - crack my heart! - stave my brain! - mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board! - lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!

Poem in October" It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore The morning beckon With water praying and call of seagull and rook And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall Myself to set foot That second In the still sleeping town and set forth. My birthday began with the water- Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name Above the farms and the white horses And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days. High tide and the heron dived when I took the road Over the border And the gates Of the town closed as the town awoke. A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder, Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly Come in the morning where I wandered and listened To the rain wringing Wind blow cold In the wood faraway under me. Pale rain over the dwindling harbour And over the sea wet church the size of a snail With its horns through mist and the castle Brown as owls But all the gardens Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud. There could I marvel My birthday Away but the weather turned around. It turned away from the blithe country And down the other air and the blue altered sky Streamed again a wonder of summer With apples Pears and red currants And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sun light And the legends of the green chapels And the twice told fields of infancy That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine. These were the woods the river and sea Where a boy In the listening Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide. And the mystery Sang alive Still in the water and singingbirds. And there could I marvel my birthday Away but the weather turned around. And the true Joy of the long dead child sang burning In the sun. It was my thirtieth Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. O may my heart's truth Still be sung On this high hill in a year's turning.

Much of Chinese society still expected its women to hold themselves in a sedate manner, lower their eyelids in response to men's stares, and restrict their smile to a faint curve of the lips which did not expose their teeth. They were not meant to use hand gestures at all. If they contravened any of these canons of behavior they would be considered 'flirtatious." Under Mao, flirting with./bre/gners was an unspeakable crime. I was furious at the innuendo against me. It had been my Communist parents who had given me a liberal upbringing. They had regarded the restrictions on women as precisely the sort of thing a Communist revolution should put an end to. But now oppression of women joined hands with political repression, and served resentment and petty jealousy. One day, a Pakistani ship arrived. The Pakistani military attache came down from Peking. Long ordered us all to spring-clean the club from top to bottom, and laid on a banquet, for which he asked me to be his interpreter, which made some of the other students extremely envious. A few days later the Pakistanis gave a farewell dinner on their ship, and I was invited. The military attache had been to Sichuan, and they had prepared a special Sichuan dish for me. Long was delighted by the invitation, as was I. But despite a personal appeal from the captain and even a threat from Long to bar future students, my teachers said that no one was allowed on board a foreign ship. "Who would take the responsibility if someone sailed away on the ship?" they asked. I was told to say I was busy that evening. As far as I knew, I was turning down the only chance I would ever have of a trip out to sea, a foreign meal, a proper conversation in English, and an experience of the outside world. Even so, I could not silence the whispers. Ming asked pointedly, "Why do foreigners like her so much?" as though there was something suspicious in that. The report filed on me at the end of the trip said my behavior was 'politically dubious." In this lovely port, with its sunshine, sea breezes, and coconut trees, every occasion that should have been joyous was turned into misery. I had a good friend in the group who tried to cheer me up by putting my distress into perspective. Of course, what I encountered was no more than minor unpleasantness compared with what victims of jealousy suffered in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. But the thought that this was what my life at its best would be like depressed me even more. This friend was the son of a colleague of my father's. The other students from cities were also friendly to me. It was easy to distinguish them from the students of peasant backgrounds, who provided most of the student officials.

During my first several days there I really did feel like a fish out of water. After years of following a military dress code I wasn’t even sure what to wear. The one place I felt like I fit in was out on a boat and, fortunately, trials for the freshman sailing team began right away.

Oh, you're right. I'm just a human with thick skin, purple eyes, and hard bones. Which means you can go home. Tell Galen I said hi." Toraf opens and shuts his mouth twice. Both times it seems like he wants to say something, but his expression tells me his brain isn't cooperating. When his mouth snaps shut a third time, I splash water in his face. "Are you going to say something, or are you trying to catch wind and sail? A grin the size of the horizon spreads across his face. "He likes that, you know. Your temper." Yeahfreakingright. Galen's a classic type A personality-and type A's hate smartass-ism. Just ask my mom. "No offense, but you're not exactly an expert at judging people's emotions." "I'm not sure what you mean by that." "Sure you do." "If you're talking about Rayna, then you're wrong. She loves me. She just won't admit it." I roll my eyes. "Right. She's playing hard to get, is that it? Bashing your head with a rock, splitting your lip, calling you squid breath all the time." "What does that mean? Hard to get?" "It means she's trying to make you think she doesn't like you, so that you end up liking her more. So you work harder to get her attention." He nods. "Exactly. That's exactly what she's doing." Pinching the bridge of my nose, I say, "I don't think so. As we speak, she's getting your mating seal dissolved. That's not playing hard to get. That's playing impossible to get." "Even if she does get it dissolved, it's not because she doesn't care about me. She just likes to play games." The pain in Toraf's voice guts me like the catch of the day. She might like playing games, but his feelings are real. And can't I relate to that? "There's only one way to find out," I say softly. "Find out?" "If all she wants is games." "How?" "You play hard to get. You know how they say. 'If you love someone, set them free. If they return to you, it was meant to be?'" "I've never heard that." "Right. No, you wouldn't have." I sigh. "Basically, what I'm trying to say is, you need to stop giving Rayna attention. Push her away. Treat her like she treats you." He shakes his head. "I don't think I can do that." "You'll get your answer that way," I say, shrugging. "But it sounds like you don't really want to know." "I do want to know. But what if the answer isn't good?" His face scrunches as if the words taste like lemon juice. "You've got to be ready to deal with it, no matter what." Toraf nods, his jaw tight. The choices he has to consider will make this night long enough for him. I decide not to intrude on his time anymore. "I'm pretty tired, so I'm heading back. I'll meet you at Galen's in the morning. Maybe I can break thirty minutes tomorrow, huh?" I nudge his shoulder with my fist, but a weak smile is all I get in return. I'm surprised when he grabs my hand and starts pulling me through the water. At least it's better than dragging me by the ankle. I can't but think how Galen could have done the same thing. Why does he wrap his arms around me instead?

cable, and away to sea. But the wind was wanting; and to complete our helplessness, down came Hunter with the news that Jim Hawkins had slipped into a boat and was gone ashore with the rest. It never occurred to us to doubt Jim Hawkins, but we were alarmed for his safety. With the men in the temper they were in, it seemed an even chance if we should see the lad again. We ran on deck. The pitch was bubbling in the seams; the nasty stench of the place turned me sick; if ever a man smelt fever and dysentery, it was in that abominable anchorage. The six scoundrels were sitting grumbling under a sail in the forecastle; ashore we could see the gigs made fast and a man sitting in each, hard by where the river runs in. One of them was whistling "Lillibullero." Waiting was a strain, and it was decided that Hunter and I should go ashore with the jolly-boat in quest of information. The gigs had leaned to their right, but Hunter and I pulled straight in, in the direction of the stockade upon the chart. The two who were left guarding their boats seemed in a bustle at our appearance; "Lillibullero" stopped off, and I could see the pair discussing what they ought to do. Had they gone and told Silver, all might have turned out differently;

What did I want? I wanted a Roc's egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist, and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur - I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles. I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, "The game's afoot!" I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin. I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and to eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be the way they had promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is. I had had one chance - for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be - and I had known it and I had let it slip away. Maybe one chance is all you ever get.

I was struck by how life moved so fast, almost cruelly, on Broadway. Fiorello! had fled the Broadhurst to make way for Sail Away, as if it had never existed. I studied each such metamorphosis with contradictory emotions of excitement and loss. With their new marquees and posters and glass-encased displays of fresh photos, the theaters promised a teeming bounty of surprises. But there remained not a shred of their previous tenants, who were gone forever and mourned by no one, perhaps, except me. When shows left the National, I knew they were going on to Broadway or at least to another town on the road. Where did the plays that left New York go?

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, -- determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

I shall desire you as I desire in turn the fruit that hangs out of reach, the far-off water, and the blissful little house that I pass by. In each place where my desires have strayed, I leave thousands and thousands of shadows in my own shape, shed from me: one lies on the warm blue rocks of the ledges in my own country, another in the damp hollow of a sunless valley, and a third follows a bird, a sail, the wind and the wave. You keep the most enduring of them: a naked, undulating shadow, trembling with pleasure like a plant in the stream. But time will dissolve it like the others, and you will no longer know anything of me until the day when my steps finally halt and there will fly away from me a last small shadow.

I will fly away to them, to the royal birds, and they will beat me, because I, that am so ugly, dare to come near them. But it is all the same. Better to be killed by them than to be pursued by ducks, and beaten by fowls, and pushed about by the girl who takes care of the poultry yard, and to suffer hunger in winter!" And it flew out into the water, and swam towards the beautiful swans; these looked at it, and came sailing down upon it with outspread wings. "Kill me!" said the poor creature, and bent its head down upon the water, expecting nothing but death. But what was this that it saw in the clear water? It beheld its own image; and, lo! it was no longer a clumsy dark-gray bird, ugly and hateful to look at, but a—swan!

Employment in the Small Bookstore" Twelve Poems, 1975 The dust is almost motionless in this narrowness, this stillness, yet how unlike a coffin it is, sometimes letting a live one in, sometimes out and the air, though paused, impends not a thing, the silence isn't sinister, and in fact not much goes on at the Ariel Book Shop today, no one weeps in the back room full of books, old books, no one is tearing the books to shreds, in fact I am merely sitting here talking to no one, no one being here, and I am blameless, More, I am grateful for the job, I am fond of the books and touch them, I am grateful that King St. goes down to the river, and that the rain is lovely, the afternoon green. If the soft falling away of the afternoon is all there is, it is nearly enough, just let me hear the beautiful clear voice of a woman in song passing toward silence, and then that will be all for me at five o'clock I will walk down to see the untended sailing yachts of the Potomac bobbing hopelessly in another silence, the small silence that gets to be a long one when the past stops talking to you because it is dead, and still you listen, hearing just the tiny agonies of old boats on a cloudy day, in cloudy water. Talk to it. Men are talking to it by Cape Charles, for them it's the same silence with fishing lines in their hands. We are all looking at the river bearing the wreckage so far away. We wonder how the river ever came to be so grey, and think that once there were some very big doings on this river, and now that is all over.

I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.

EVERYTHING SMELLED LIKE POISON. Two days after leaving Venice, Hazel still couldn’t get the noxious scent of eau de cow monster out of her nose. The seasickness didn’t help. The Argo II sailed down the Adriatic, a beautiful glittering expanse of blue; but Hazel couldn’t appreciate it, thanks to the constant rolling of the ship. Above deck, she tried to keep her eyes fixed on the horizon—the white cliffs that always seemed just a mile or so to the east. What country was that, Croatia? She wasn’t sure. She just wished she were on solid ground again. The thing that nauseated her most was the weasel. Last night, Hecate’s pet Gale had appeared in her cabin. Hazel woke from a nightmare, thinking, What is that smell? She found a furry rodent propped on her chest, staring at her with its beady black eyes. Nothing like waking up screaming, kicking off your covers, and dancing around your cabin while a weasel scampers between your feet, screeching and farting. Her friends rushed to her room to see if she was okay. The weasel was difficult to explain. Hazel could tell that Leo was trying hard not to make a joke. In the morning, once the excitement died down, Hazel decided to visit Coach Hedge, since he could talk to animals. She’d found his cabin door ajar and heard the coach inside, talking as if he were on the phone with someone—except they had no phones on board. Maybe he was sending a magical Iris-message? Hazel had heard that the Greeks used those a lot. “Sure, hon,” Hedge was saying. “Yeah, I know, baby. No, it’s great news, but—” His voice broke with emotion. Hazel suddenly felt horrible for eavesdropping. She would’ve backed away, but Gale squeaked at her heels. Hazel knocked on the coach’s door. Hedge poked his head out, scowling as usual, but his eyes were red. “What?” he growled. “Um…sorry,” Hazel said. “Are you okay?” The coach snorted and opened his door wide. “Kinda question is that?” There was no one else in the room. “I—” Hazel tried to remember why she was there. “I wondered if you could talk to my weasel.” The coach’s eyes narrowed. He lowered his voice. “Are we speaking in code? Is there an intruder aboard?” “Well, sort of.” Gale peeked out from behind Hazel’s feet and started chattering. The coach looked offended. He chattered back at the weasel. They had what sounded like a very intense argument. “What did she say?” Hazel asked. “A lot of rude things,” grumbled the satyr. “The gist of it: she’s here to see how it goes.” “How what goes?” Coach Hedge stomped his hoof. “How am I supposed to know? She’s a polecat! They never give a straight answer. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got, uh, stuff…” He closed the door in her face. After breakfast, Hazel stood at the port rail, trying to settle her stomach. Next to her, Gale ran up and down the railing, passing gas; but the strong wind off the Adriatic helped whisk it away. Hazel

There was a crime. But there were also the lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me that I have not travelled so far after all, since I wrote my little play. Or rather, I've made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place. It is only in my last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away.

Let the sky celebrate! Let it pour some rain to wash away the past years' grief. Let the fireworks speak announcing a New Year to break, displaying seasons of different flavours. Oh New Year, can you restore our hopes and spill our fears? I wonder.. What will you bring? Happiness, confusion, or sadness? Let the other years witness.. your joy, your pity, your cruelty, and your niceness. So New Year, I have too many hopes in you. My wishes are infinite, what are you going to do? Don't disappoint me, I suppose you already know. The hope fountain knows no chains, Don't tell me it's all in vain.. Tell me how I can refrain myself from dreaming in my dale. If only there was a chance or even an opportunity in disguise, I wouldn't cease proving and proving my worth all the time, I would use my ship to sail, And you will witness my success.. This is what I promise, And here comes the test.. Let me declare it in that feast.. So New Year, I have too many hopes in you..

Something terrible was clawing up her throat. “I was lucky,” Arin said. “I had you. And a hard head. And the grace of my god.” “Damn>/i> your god.” Arin caught her arm above the elbow. She turned to face him. All trace of humor had left his face. His eyes were wide, urgent. “Don’t say that.” “Why not? I can say anything. Anything except what really matters.” “Kestrel, take it back. You’ll offend him.” “Your god risks you.” “He protects me.” “You’re his plaything.” “You’re wrong. He loves me.” Saying those words made him look so alone. He reminded her of sails curved by the wind, full and yet empty at the same time. She found that she was jealous of his god. The sudden jealousy held her so hard in its grip that she couldn’t breathe. “It’s true,” Arin insisted. She saw then that she had hurt him, that his god’s love was all the more precious to him because of his fear that he would find it nowhere else. Her anger rinsed away. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I ask your pardon. His, too.

Жираф Сегодня, я вижу, особенно грустен твой взгляд, И руки особенно тонки, колени обняв. Послушай: далёко, далёко на озере Чад Изысканный бродит жираф. Ему грациозная стройность и нега дана, И шкуру его украшает волшебный узор, С которым равняться осмелиться только Луна, Дробясь и качаясь на влаге широких озёр. Вдали он подобен цветным парусам корабля, И бег его плавен, как радостный птичий полёт. Я знаю, что много чудесного видит земля, Когда на закате он прячется в мраморный грот. Я знаю весёлые сказки таинственных стран Про чёрную деву, про страсть молодого вождя, Но ты слишком долго вдыхала тяжёлый туман, Ты верить не хочешь во что-нибудь, кроме дождя. И как я тебе расскажу про тропический сад, Про стройный пальмы, про запах немыслимых трав... Ты плачешь? Послушай... далёко, на озере Чад Изысканный бродит жираф. The Giraffe O, the look in your eyes this morning is more than usually sad, With your little arms wrapped round your knees and body bent in half. Let me tell you a story: far, far away, on the distant shores of Lake Chad, There roams a most majestic giraffe Blessed with a handsome build and graceful carriage And a coat painted hypnotic, magical patterns, With which none but the moon above dare compare When her light falls down to be scattered and rocked on the waters, Passing like a blazing sail far out at sea As she runs by, nimble and carefree as a bird in flight. I hear tell the earth has seen many wonderful things When the giraffe hides herself away and the sun sets into night. I know fabulous tales of far off, alien lands, Of a dark maiden, of a young captain’s burning desire, all this I know, But you’ve breathed in the damp marsh air for so long You don’t want to believe in anything but the rain out your window. I still haven’t told you about her tropic garden, with the slenderest palm trees, The sweetest wildflowers, meadows of unbelievable grass . . . Are you crying? Let me tell you a story: far away, on the distant shores of Lake Chad, There roams a most majestic giraffe.

That yes you commit to as reader and writer is the current that hums through all the work. Of course, you might say yes and then come up against an iceberg. No, you suddenly say definitively. And there you are. What do you do next? I can’t answer that for you, but I do know you eventually have to do something—or freeze to death. See if you can chip away at even a little of the mass in front of you—or try standing up on it. Does it support you? In a weeklong cold winter workshop in Taos I read aloud this passage from Richard Nelson’s The Island Within: The first section of road follows the bay’s edge, behind a strip of tall, leafless alders. When we’re about halfway around, a bald eagle in dark, youthful plumage sails down to a fish carcass on the beach just ahead. He seems careless or unafraid—quite different from the timid, sharp-eyed elders—so I leash Shungnak to the bike, drop my pack, and try to sneak in for a closer look. Using a driftwood pile as a screen, I stalk within fifty feet of the bird, but he spots me peering out between the logs.

Over and over again I sail towards joy, which is never in the room with me, but always near me, across the way, like those rooms full of gayety one sees from the street, or the gayety in the street one sees from a window. Will I ever reach joy? It hides behind the turning merry-go-round of the traveling circus. As soon as I approach it, it is no longer joy. Joy is a foam, an illumination. I am poorer and hungrier for the want of it. When I am in the dance, joy is outside in the elusive garden. When I am in the garden, I hear it exploding from the house. When I am traveling, joy settles like an aurora borealis over the land I leave. When I stand on the shore I see it bloom on the flag of a departing ship. What joy? Have I not possessed it? I want the joy of simple colors, street organs, ribbons, flags, not a joy that takes my breath away and throws me into space alone where no one else can breathe with me, not the joy that comes from a lonely drunkenness. There are so many joys, but I have only known the ones that come like a miracle, touching everything with light.

And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun’s surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet, the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger; feel the now. Spring is seeping north, towards me and away from me, at sixteen miles a day. Along estuary banks of tidal rivers all over the world, snails in black clusters like currants are gliding up and down the stems of reed and sedge, migrating every moment with the dip and swing of tides. Behind me, Tinker Mountain is eroding one thousandth of an inch a year. The sharks I saw are roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they need dance. Somewhere east of me, on another continent, it is sunset, and starlings in breathtaking bands are winding high in the sky to their evening roost. The mantis egg cases are tied to the mock-orange hedge; within each case, within each egg, cells elongate, narrow, and split; cells bubble and curve inward, align, harden or hollow or stretch. And where are you now?

Let’s each take a Sailfish and have a race,” George cried, running over to a pretty light-blue boat, with a yellow sail wrapped neatly around the mast. The mast and rudder had been placed carefully next to the hull. “That sounds like fun,” Nancy said enthusiastically. “Which boat would you like, Bess?” Nancy was eying a dark-green one with a red stripe around it. Its white sail, mast, and rudder were placed exactly like the others. “Someone keeps things shipshape around here,” she thought admiringly. “These boats look like painted wooden soldiers all lined up.” “I’ll stick to the rowboat, thanks,” Bess said. “I’d rather be under my own steam. If I took a sailboat, the wind might blow me somewhere I didn’t want to go,” she added, glancing at a breakwater of rocks not far away. “Don’t worry, Bess,” said Nancy. “Why don’t you come with me? We can always tack back when you say the word. It’s a light offshore wind,” she added, looking up at the pennant on the boathouse. “And I promise to head up into the wind, whenever you’re scared, although I don’t relish getting in irons. Oh well, if we do, you can jump out and push!” Nancy laughed.

I REMEMBER the day the Aleut ship came to our island. At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea. Then it grew larger and was a gull with folded wings. At last in the rising sun it became what it really was—a red ship with two red sails. My brother and I had gone to the head of a canyon that winds down to a little harbor which is called Coral Cove. We had gone to gather roots that grow there in the spring. My brother Ramo was only a little boy half my age, which was twelve. He was small for one who had lived so many suns and moons, but quick as a cricket. Also foolish as a cricket when he was excited. For this reason and because I wanted him to help me gather roots and not go running off, I said nothing about the shell I saw or the gull with folded wings. I went on digging in the brush with my pointed stick as though nothing at all were happening on the sea. Even when I knew for sure that the gull was a ship with two red sails. But Ramo’s eyes missed little in the world. They were black like a lizard’s and very large and, like the eyes of a lizard, could sometimes look sleepy. This was the time when they saw the most. This was the way they looked now. They were half-closed, like those of a lizard lying on a rock about to flick out its tongue to catch a fly. “The sea is smooth,” Ramo said. “It is a flat stone without any scratches.” My brother liked to pretend that one thing was another. “The sea is not a stone without scratches,” I said. “It is water and no waves.” “To me it is a blue stone,” he said. “And far away on the edge of it is a small cloud which sits on the stone.” “Clouds do not sit on stones. On blue ones or black ones or any kind of stones.” “This one does.” “Not on the sea,” I said. “Dolphins sit there, and gulls, and cormorants, and otter, and whales too, but not clouds.” “It is a whale, maybe.” Ramo was standing on one foot and then the other, watching the ship coming, which he did not know was a ship because he had never seen one. I had never seen one either, but I knew how they looked because I had been told. “While you gaze at the sea,” I said, “I dig roots. And it is I who will eat them and you who will not.” Ramo began to punch at the earth with his stick, but as the ship came closer, its sails showing red through the morning mist, he kept watching it, acting all the time as if he were not. “Have you ever seen a red whale?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, though I never had. “Those I have seen are gray.” “You are very young and have not seen everything that swims in the world.” Ramo picked up a root and was about to drop it into the basket. Suddenly his mouth opened wide and then closed again. “A canoe!” he cried. “A great one, bigger than all of our canoes together. And red!” A canoe or a ship, it did not matter to Ramo. In the very next breath he tossed the root in the air and was gone, crashing through the brush, shouting as he went. I kept on gathering roots, but my hands trembled as I dug in the earth, for I was more excited than my brother. I knew that it was a ship there on the

He cleared his throat. “So tell me,” he asked, “what do they call you when they want to call you something other than Tania or Tatiana?” Her heart jumped. “Who’s they?” Alexander said nothing for what seemed like minutes. Tatiana backed away from him, and when she was five meters away, she looked at his face. All she wanted to do was look into his wonderful face. “Sometimes,” she said, “they call me Tatia.” He smiled. The silences tormented her. What to do during them? “You are very beautiful, Tatia,” said Alexander. “Stop,” she said—inaudibly—as sensation left her legs. He called after her, “If you wanted to, you could call me Shura.” Shura! That’s a marvelous endearment. I would love to call you Shura, she wanted to tell him. “Who calls you Shura?” “Nobody,” Alexander replied with a salute. Tatiana didn’t just walk home. She flew. She grew brilliant red wings, and on them she sailed through the azure Leningrad sky. Closer to home, her heavy-with-guilt heart brought her down and the wings disappeared. She tied up her hair and made sure his books were at the very bottom of her bag. But she couldn’t go upstairs for a number of minutes as she stood against the wall of the building, clenching both fists to her chest.

Cat!” Rhett shook her. “Stop that. The cat’s not important. Where are the stables, Scarlett? We need horses.” “Oh, you fool,” said Scarlett. Her strained voice was heavy with loving pity. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Let me go. I’ve got to find Cat—Katie O’Hara, called Cat. She’s your daughter.” Rhett’s hands closed painfully on Scarlett’s arms. “What the devil are you talking about?” He looked down into her face, but he couldn’t make out her expression in the darkness. “Answer me, Scarlett,” he demanded, and he shook her. “Let go of me, damn you! There’s no time for explanations now. Cat must be here someplace, but it’s dark, and she’s all alone. Let go, Rhett, and ask your questions later. All that isn’t important now.” Scarlett tried to break free, but he was too strong. “It’s important to me.” His voice was rough with urgency. “All right, all right. It happened when we went sailing and the storm came. You remember. I found out I was pregnant in Savannah, but you hadn’t come for me, and I was angry, so I didn’t tell you right away. How was I to know you would be married to Anne before you could hear about the baby?” “Oh, dear God,” Rhett groaned, and he released Scarlett. “Where is she?” he said. “We’ve got to find her.” “We

I shall report this, and in the meantime the animal can be taken away by one of the porters.’ ‘Don’t you dare,’ said Emmy fiercely. ‘I’ll not allow it. You are—’ It was unfortunate that she was interrupted before she could finish. ‘Ah,’ said Professor ter Mennolt, looming behind the supervisor. ‘My kitten. Good of you to look after it for me, Ermentrude.’ He gave the supervisor a bland smile. ‘I am breaking the rules, am I not? But this seemed the best place for it to be until I could come and collect it.’ ‘Miss Foster has just told me…’ began the woman. ‘Out of the kindness of her heart,’ said the professor outrageously. ‘She had no wish to get me into trouble. Isn’t that correct, Ermentrude?’ She nodded, and watched while he soothed the supervisor’s feelings with a bedside manner which she couldn’t have faulted. ‘I will overlook your rudeness, Miss Foster,’ she said finally, and sailed away. ‘Where on earth did you find it?’ asked the professor with interest. She told him, then went on, ‘I’ll take him home. He’ll be nice company for Snoodles and George.’ ‘An excellent idea. Here is your relief. I shall be outside when you are ready.’ ‘Why?’ asked Emmy. ‘You sometimes ask silly questions, Ermentrude. To take you both home.

I saw and heard all sorts of things in my fever; I was riding a merry-go-round, I wanted to get off but I couldn’t. I was one of many little children sitting in fire engines and hollowed-out swans, on dogs, cats, pigs, and stags, riding round and round. I wanted to get off but I wasn’t allowed to. All the little children were crying, like me they wanted to get out of the fire engines and hollowed-out swans, down from the backs of the cats, dogs, pigs, and stags, they didn’t want to ride on the merry-go-round any more, but they weren’t allowed to get off. The Heavenly Father was standing beside the merry-go-round and every time it stopped, he paid for another turn. And we prayed: “Oh, our Father who art in heaven, we know you have lots of loose change, we know you like to treat us to rides on the merry-go-round, we know you like to prove to us that this world is round. Please put your pocket-book away, say stop, finished, fertig, basta, stoi, closing time—we poor little children are dizzy, they’ve brought us, four thousand of us, to K"asemark on the Vistula, but we can’t get across, because your merry-go-round, your merry-go-round…” But God our Father, the merry-go-round owner, smiled in his most benevolent manner and another coin came sailing out of his purse to make the merry-go-round keep on turning, carrying four thousand children with Oskar in their midst, in fire engines and hollowed-out swans, on cats, dogs, pigs, and stags, round and round in a ring, and every time my stag—I’m still quite sure it was a stag—carried us past our Father in heaven, the merry-go-round owner, he had a different face: He was Rasputin, laughing and biting the coin for the next ride with his faith healer’s teeth; and then he was Goethe, the poet prince, holding a beautifully embroidered purse, and the coins he took out of it were all stamped with his father-in-heaven profile; and then again Rasputin, tipsy, and again Herr von Goethe, sober. A bit of madness with Rasputin and a bit of rationality with Goethe. The extremists with Rasputin, the forces of order with Goethe.

Richard and I seemed really to be at the end of our rope, for he had done what he could for me, and it had not worked out, and now he was going away. It seemed to me that he was sailing into the most splendid of futures, for he was going, of all places! to France, and he had been invited there by the French government. But Richard did not seem, though he was jaunty, to be overjoyed. There was a striking sobriety in his face that day. He talked a great deal about a friend of his, who was in trouble with the U.S. Immigration authorities, and was about to be, or already had been, deported. Richard was not being deported, of course, he was traveling to a foreign country as an honored guest; and he was vain enough and young enough and vivid enough to find this very pleasing and exciting. Yet he knew a great deal about exile, all artists do, especially American artists, especially American Negro artists. He had endured already, liberals and literary critics to the contrary, a long exile in his own country. He must have wondered what the real thing would be like. And he must have wondered, too, what would be the unimaginable effect on his daughter, who could now be raised in a country which would not penalize her on account of her color. And that day was very nearly the last time Richard and I spoke to each other without the later, terrible warfare. Two years later, I, too, quit America, never intending to return.

When I was a kid,'' she said. ``These sort of stories always start like this, don't they, `When I was a kid ...' Anyway. This is the bit where the girl suddenly says, `When I was a kid' and starts to unburden herself. We have got to that bit. When I was a kid I had this picture hanging over the foot of my bed ... What do you think of it so far?'' ``I like it. I think it's moving well. You're getting the bedroom interest in nice and early. We could probably do with some development with the picture.'' ``It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like,'' she said, ``but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?'' ``I know. I was plagued with them too. Rabbits in waistcoats.'' ``Exactly. These rabbits were in fact on a raft, as were assorted rats and owls. There may even have been a reindeer.'' ``On the raft.'' ``On the raft. And a boy was sitting on the raft.'' ``Among the rabbits in waistcoats and the owls and the reindeer.'' ``Precisely there. A boy of the cheery gypsy ragamuffin variety.'' ``Ugh.'' ``The picture worried me, I must say. There was an otter swimming in front of the raft, and I used to lie awake at night worrying about this otter having to pull the raft, with all these wretched animals on it who shouldn't even be on a raft, and the otter had such a thin tail to pull it with I thought it must hurt pulling it all the time. Worried me. Not badly, but just vaguely, all the time. ``Then one day --- and remember I'd been looking at this picture every night for years --- I suddenly noticed that the raft had a sail. Never seen it before. The otter was fine, he was just swimming along.'' She shrugged. ``Good story?'' she said. ``Ends weakly,'' said Arthur, ``leaves the audience crying `Yes, but what of it?' Fine up till there, but needs a final sting before the credits.'' Fenchurch laughed and hugged her legs. ``It was just such a sudden revelation, years of almost unnoticed worry just dropping away, like taking off heavy weights, like black and white becoming colour, like a dry stick suddenly being watered. The sudden shift of perspective that says `Put away your worries, the world is a good and perfect place. It is in fact very easy.

The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look!—it is too beautiful to eat. Then the woman and the swan sailed across an ocean many thousands of li wide, stretching their necks toward America. On her journey she cooed to the swan: “In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow! She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan—a creature that became more than what was hoped for.” But when she arrived in the new country, the immigration officials pulled her swan away from her, leaving the woman fluttering her arms and with only one swan feather for a memory. And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind. Now the woman was old. And she had a daughter who grew up speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow. For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, “This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.” And she waited year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.

Please go outside. I really don’t want to hurt you.” Levi pulled up short. “No. Not toward me. To the door. The door!” She squealed, and Levi bounded forward, taking the stairs in a single leap. He threw the door wide and brought up his fists, ready to take on the unseen threat. “Get it off! Get it off!” She held her skirts away from her body and twisted her head to the side as if trying to put as much distance as possible between her and the invader clinging to the dark green fabric of her dress. A cockroach. A big ugly one—three, maybe four inches long, its wings still slightly askew. “Please.” Miss Spencer whimpered, and the sound galvanized him to action. Levi opened his hand and swiped the oversized beetle from her skirt. Then, before the thing could scamper into a dark corner, he crushed it with a stomp of his boot, wincing at the audible crunch that echoed in the now-quiet hall. He scraped his sole over the carcass like a horse pawing the ground, and sent the bug sailing out the door. “Did you have to squish him?” Levi jerked his eyes to Eden Spencer’s face. What had she expected him to do? Tie a leash around its neck and take it for a walk? “Don’t get me wrong,” she said, as she raised a shaky hand to fidget with the button at her collar. “I appreciate your removing that beastly insect from my person.” She shuddered slightly, and her gaze dropped to the darkened spot on the hardwood floor that evidenced the roach’s demise. “However, I can’t abide violence against any of God’s creatures. Even horrid, wing-sprouting behemoths.

What will you do if you win the Scorpio Races?” I look into the bucket. “Oh, I’ll buy fourteen dresses and build a road and name it after myself and try one of everything at Palsson’s.” Though I don’t quite look up, I can still feel his gaze on me. It’s a heavy thing, this look of his. He says, “What’s the real answer?” But when I try to think of a real answer, it reminds me of Father Mooneyham saying that Gabe had sat in the confessional and cried, and it makes me think of how, no matter what happens in the races, the best option still has Gabe sailing away in a boat. So I snap, “Do you think I just turn my secrets out for everyone?” He is unfazed. “I didn’t know they were secrets,” he says. “Or I wouldn’t have asked.” It makes me feel ungenerous, since he’d answered so honestly. “I’m sorry,” I say. “My mother always said that I was born out of a bottle of vinegar instead of born from a womb and that she and my father bathed me in sugar for three days to wash it off. I try to behave, but I always go back to the vinegar.” When Dad was in one of his rare, fanciful moods, he told guests that the pixies left me on the doorstep because I bit their fingers too often. My favorite was always when Mum said that before I was born, it rained for seven days and seven nights solid, and when she went out into the yard to ask the sky what it was weeping for, I dropped out of the clouds at her feet and the sun came out. I always liked the idea of being such a bother that I affected even the weather. Sean says, “Don’t apologize. I was being too free.” And now I feel even worse, because that wasn’t what I meant at all.

I Won’t Write Your Obituary You asked if you could call to say goodbye if you were ever really gonna kill yourself. Sure, but I won’t write your obituary. I’ll commission it from some dead-end journalist who will say things like: “At peace… Better place… Fought the good fight…” Maybe reference the loving embrace of Capital-G-God at least 4 times. Maybe quote Charles fucking Bukowski. And I won’t stop them because I won’t write your obituary. But if you call me, I will write you a new sky, one you can taste. I will write you a D-I-Y cloud maker so on days when you can’t do anything you can still make clouds in whatever shape you want them. I will write you letters, messages in bottles, in cages, in orange peels, in the distance between here and the moon, in forests and rivers and bird songs. I will write you songs. I can’t write music, but I’ll find Rihanna, and I’ll get her to write you music if it will make you want to dance a little longer. I will write you a body whose veins are electricity because outlets are easier to find than good shrinks, but we will find you a good shrink. I will write you 1-800-273-8255, that’s the suicide hotline; we can call it together. And yeah, you can call me, but I won’t tell you it’s okay, that I forgive you. I won’t say “goodbye” or “I love you” one last time. You won’t leave on good terms with me, Because I will not forgive you. I won’t read you your last rights, absolve you of sin, watch you sail away on a flaming viking ship, my hand glued to my forehead. I will not hold your hand steady around a gun. And after, I won’t come by to pick up the package of body parts you will have left specifically for me. I’ll get a call like “Ma’am, what would you have us do with them?” And I’ll say, “Burn them. Feed them to stray cats. Throw them at school children. Hurl them at the sea. I don’t care. I don’t want them.” I don’t want your heart. It’s not yours anymore, it’s just a heart now and I already have one. I don’t want your lungs, just deflated birthday party balloons that can’t breathe anymore. I don’t want a jar of your teeth as a memento. I don’t want your ripped off skin, a blanket to wrap myself in when I need to feel like your still here. You won’t be there. There’s no blood there, there’s no life there, there’s no you there. I want you. And I will write you so many fucking dead friend poems, that people will confuse my tongue with your tombstone and try to plant daisies in my throat before I ever write you an obituary while you’re still fucking here. So the answer to your question is “yes”. If you’re ever really gonna kill yourself, yes, please, call me.

golden opportunity to learn to cope with criticism and anger effectively. This came as a complete surprise to me; I hadn't realized what good fortune I had. In addition to urging me to use cognitive techniques to reduce and eliminate my own sense of irritation. Dr. Beck proposed I try out an unusual strategy for interacting with Hank when he was in an angry mood. The essence of this method was: (1) Don't turn Hank off by defending yourself. Instead, do the opposite—urge him to say all the worst things he can say about you. (2) Try to find a grain of truth in all his criticisms and then agree with him. (3) After this, point out any areas of disagreement in a straightforward, tactful, nonargumentative manner. (4) Emphasize the importance of sticking together, in spite of these occasional disagreements. I could remind Hank that frustration and fighting might slow down our therapy at times, but this need not destroy the relationship or prevent our work from ultimately becoming fruitful. I applied this strategy the next time Hank started storming around the office screaming at me. Just as I had planned, I urged Hank to keep it up and say all the worst things he could think of about me. The result was immediate and dramatic. Within a few moments, all the wind went out of his sails—all his vengeance seemed to melt away. He began communicating sensibly and calmly, and sat down. In fact, when I agreed with some of his criticisms, he suddenly began to defend me and say some nice things about me! I was so impressed with this result that I began using the same approach with other angry, explosive individuals, and I actually did begin to enjoy his hostile outbursts because I had an effective way to handle them. I also used the double-column technique for recording and talking back to my automatic thoughts after one of Hank's midnight calls (see Figure 16–1, page 415).

As they left the library, Arin said, “Kestrel--” “Not a word. Don’t speak until we are in the carriage.” They walked swiftly down the halls--Arin’s halls--and when Kestrel stole sidelong looks at him he still seemed stunned and dizzy. Kestrel had been seasick before, at the beginning of her sailing lessons, and she wondered if this was how Arin felt, surrounded by his home--like when the eyes can pinpoint the horizon but the stomach cannot. Their silence broke when the carriage door closed them in. “You are mad.” Arin’s voice was furious, desperate. “It was my book. My doing. You had no right to interfere. Did you think I couldn’t bear the punishment for being caught?” “Arin.” Fear trembled through her as she finally realized what she had done. She strove to sound calm. “A duel is simply a ritual.” “It’s not yours to fight.” “You know you cannot. Irex would never accept, and if you drew a blade on him, every Valorian in the vicinity would cut you down. Irex won’t kill me.” He gave her a cynical look. “Do you deny that he is the superior fighter?” “So he will draw first blood. He will be satisfied, and we will both walk away with honor.” “He said something about a death-price.” That was the law’s penalty for a duel to the death. The victor paid a high sum to the dead duelist’s family. Kestrel dismissed this. “It will cost Irex more than gold to kill General Trajan’s daughter.” Arin dropped his face into his hands. He began to swear, to recite every insult against the Valorian’s the Herrani had invented, to curse them by every god. “Really, Arin.” His hands fell away. “You, too. What a stupid thing for you to do. Why did you do that? Why would you do such a stupid thing?” She thought of his claim that Enai could never have loved her, or if she had, it was a forced love. “You might not think of me as your friend,” Kestrel told Arin, “but I think of you as mine.

Letter You can see it already: chalks and ochers; Country crossed with a thousand furrow-lines; Ground-level rooftops hidden by the shrubbery; Sporadic haystacks standing on the grass; Smoky old rooftops tarnishing the landscape; A river (not Cayster or Ganges, though: A feeble Norman salt-infested watercourse); On the right, to the north, bizarre terrain All angular--you'd think a shovel did it. So that's the foreground. An old chapel adds Its antique spire, and gathers alongside it A few gnarled elms with grumpy silhouettes; Seemingly tired of all the frisky breezes, They carp at every gust that stirs them up. At one side of my house a big wheelbarrow Is rusting; and before me lies the vast Horizon, all its notches filled with ocean blue; Cocks and hens spread their gildings, and converse Beneath my window; and the rooftop attics, Now and then, toss me songs in dialect. In my lane dwells a patriarchal rope-maker; The old man makes his wheel run loud, and goes Retrograde, hemp wreathed tightly round the midriff. I like these waters where the wild gale scuds; All day the country tempts me to go strolling; The little village urchins, book in hand, Envy me, at the schoolmaster's (my lodging), As a big schoolboy sneaking a day off. The air is pure, the sky smiles; there's a constant Soft noise of children spelling things aloud. The waters flow; a linnet flies; and I say: "Thank you! Thank you, Almighty God!"--So, then, I live: Peacefully, hour by hour, with little fuss, I shed My days, and think of you, my lady fair! I hear the children chattering; and I see, at times, Sailing across the high seas in its pride, Over the gables of the tranquil village, Some winged ship which is traveling far away, Flying across the ocean, hounded by all the winds. Lately it slept in port beside the quay. Nothing has kept it from the jealous sea-surge: No tears of relatives, nor fears of wives, Nor reefs dimly reflected in the waters, Nor importunity of sinister birds.

Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father's sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy's face from the window! the boy's hand on the hill!" But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. "What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new- mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths - Starbuck!" But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.

To this day when I inhale a light scent of Wrangler—its sweet sharpness—or the stronger, darker scent of Musk, I return to those hours and it ceases to be just cologne that I take in but the very scent of age, of youth at its most beautiful peak. It bears the memory of possibility, of unknown forests, unchartered territories, and a heart light and skipping, hell-bent as the captain of any of the three ships, determined at all costs to prevail to the new world. Turning back was no option. Whatever the gales, whatever the emaciation, whatever the casualty to self, onward I kept my course. My heart felt the magnetism of its own compass guiding me on—its direction constant and sure. There was no other way through. I feel it again as once it had been, before it was broken-in; its strength and resolute ardency. The years of solitude were nothing compared to what lay ahead. In sailing for the horizon that part of my life had been sealed up, a gentle eddy, a trough of gentle waves diminishing further, receding away. Whatever loneliness and pain went with the years between the ages of 14 and 20, was closed, irretrievable—I was already cast in form and direction in a certain course. When I open the little bottle of eau de toilette five hundred different days unfold within me, conversations so strained, breaking slowly, so painstakingly, to a comfortable place. A place so warm and inviting after the years of silence and introspect, of hiding. A place in the sun that would burn me alive before I let it cast a shadow on me. Until that time I had not known, I had not been conscious of my loneliness. Yes, I had been taciturn in school, alone, I had set myself apart when others tried to engage. But though I was alone, I had not felt the pangs of loneliness. It had not burdened or tormented as such when I first felt the clear tang of its opposite in the form of another’s company. Of Regn’s company. We came, each in our own way, in our own need—listening, wanting, tentatively, as though we came upon each other from the side in spite of having seen each other head on for two years. It was a gradual advance, much again like a vessel waiting for its sails to catch wind, grasping hold of the ropes and learning much too quickly, all at once, how to move in a certain direction. There was no practicing. It was everything and all—for the first and last time. Everything had to be right, whether it was or not. The waters were beautiful, the work harder than anything in my life, but the very glimpse of any tempest of defeat was never in my line of vision. I’d never failed at anything. And though this may sound quite an exaggeration, I tell you earnestly, it is true. Everything to this point I’d ever set my mind to, I’d achieved. But this wasn’t about conquering some land, nor had any of my other desires ever been about proving something. It just had to be—I could not break, could not turn or retract once I’d committed myself to my course. You cannot force a clock to run backwards when it is made to persevere always, and ever, forward. Had I not been so young I’d never have had the courage to love her.

though she's so frank, I can't guess whether or not she ever thinks about them. She likes you, however, I am sure of that. But, Ned, it will not be wise to say anything to her yet." "Not say anything? Why not?" "No. Recollect that it is only a little while since she looked upon you as the admirer of another girl, and a girl she doesn't like very much, though they are cousins. You must give her time to get over that impression. Wait awhile; that's my advice, Ned." "I'll wait any time if only she will say yes in the end. But it's hard to go away without a word of hope, and it's more like a man to speak out, it seems to me." "It's too soon," persisted his sister. "You don't want her to think you a fickle fellow, falling in love with a fresh girl every time you go into port, and falling out again when the ship sails. Sailors have a bad reputation for that sort of thing. No woman cares to win a man like that." "Great Scott! I should think not! Do you mean to say that is the way my conduct appears to her, Polly ?" "No, I don't mean just that; but wait, dear Ned, I am sure it is better.

Sailing" Well, it's not far down to paradise, at least it's not for me And if the wind is right you can sail away and find tranquility Oh, the canvas can do miracles, just you wait and see Believe me It's not far to never-never land, no reason to pretend And if the wind is right you can find the joy of innocence again Oh, the canvas can do miracles, just you wait and see Believe me Sailing takes me away to where I've always heard it could be Just a dream and the wind to carry me And soon I will be free Fantasy, it gets the best of me When I'm sailing All caught up in the reverie, every word is a symphony Won't you believe me? Sailing takes me away to where I've always heard it could be Just a dream and the wind to carry me And soon I will be free Well it's not far back to sanity, at least it's not for me And if the wind is right you can sail away and find serenity Oh, the canvas can do miracles, just you wait and see Believe me Sailing takes me away to where I've always heard it could be Just a dream and the wind to carry me And soon I will be free Christopher Cross, Christopher Cross (1979)

Theseus Within the Labyrinth pt.2 But nobody like Theseus likes a smart girl, always telling him to dress warmly and eat plenty of fiber. She was one of those people who are never in doubt. Had he sharpened his sword, tied his sandals? Without her, of course, he would have never escaped the labyrinth. Why hadn’t he thought of that trick with the ball of yarn? But as he looked down at her sleeping form, this woman who was already carrying his child, maybe he thought of their future together, how she would correctly foretell the mystery or banality behind each locked door. So probably he shook his head and said, Give me a dumb girl any day, and crept back to his ship and sailed away. Of course Ariadne was revenged. She would have told him to change the sails, to take down the black ones, put up the white. She would have reminded him that his father, the king of Athens, was waiting on a high cliff scanning the Aegean for Theseus’s returning ship, white for victory, black for defeat. She would have said how his father would see the black sails, how the grief for the supposed death of his one son would destroy him. But Theseus and his men had brought out the wine and were cruising a calm sea in a small boat filled to the brim with ex-virgins. Who could have blamed him? Until he heard the distant scream and his head shot up to see the black sails and he knew. The girls disappeared, the ship grew quiet except for the lap-lap of the water. Staring toward the spot where his father had tumbled headfirst into the Aegean, Theseus understood he would always be a stupid man with a thick stick, scratching his forehead long after the big event. But think, does he change his mind, turn back the ship, hunt up Ariadne and beg her pardon? Far better to be stupid by himself than smart because she’d been tugging on his arm; better to live in the eternal present with a boatload of ex-virgins than in that dark land of consequences promised by Ariadne, better to live like any one of us, thinking to outwit the darkness, but knowing it will catch us, that we will be surprised like the Minotaur on his couch when the door slams back and the hired gun of our personal destruction bursts upon us, upsetting the good times and scaring the girls. Better to be ignorant, to go into the future as into a long tunnel, without ball of yarn or clear direction, to tiptoe forward like any fool or saint or hero, jumpy, full of second thoughts, and bravely unprepared.

It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone from there and who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anybody passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor would be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together nevermind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a preacher’s palm asking for witnesses in His name’s sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love. They are under the covers because they don’t have to look at themselves anymore; there is no stud’s eye, no chippie glance to undo them. They are inward toward the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls and the steamers that sailed from ports they never saw. That is what is beneath their undercover whispers. But there is another part, not so secret. The part that touches fingers when one passes the cup and saucer to the other. The part that closes her neckline snap while waiting for the trolley; and brushes lint from his blue serge suit when they come out of the movie house into the sunlight. I envy them their public love. I myself have only known it in secret, shared it in secret and longed, aw longed to show it—to be able to say out loud what they have no need to say at all: That I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else. That I want you to love me back and show it to me. That I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away from me. Talking to you and hearing you answer —that’s the kick. But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

Cat!” Rhett shook her. “Stop that. The cat’s not important. Where are the stables, Scarlett? We need horses.” “Oh, you fool,” said Scarlett. Her strained voice was heavy with loving pity. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Let me go. I’ve got to find Cat—Katie O’Hara, called Cat. She’s your daughter.” Rhett’s hands closed painfully on Scarlett’s arms. “What the devil are you talking about?” He looked down into her face, but he couldn’t make out her expression in the darkness. “Answer me, Scarlett,” he demanded, and he shook her. “Let go of me, damn you! There’s no time for explanations now. Cat must be here someplace, but it’s dark, and she’s all alone. Let go, Rhett, and ask your questions later. All that isn’t important now.” Scarlett tried to break free, but he was too strong. “It’s important to me.” His voice was rough with urgency. “All right, all right. It happened when we went sailing and the storm came. You remember. I found out I was pregnant in Savannah, but you hadn’t come for me, and I was angry, so I didn’t tell you right away. How was I to know you would be married to Anne before you could hear about the baby?” “Oh, dear God,” Rhett groaned, and he released Scarlett. “Where is she?” he said. “We’ve got to find her.

A challenge.” He tsked. “I’ll let you take it back. Just this one.” “I cannot take it back.” At that, Irex drew his dagger and imitated Kestrel’s gesture. They stood still, then sheathed their blades. “I’ll even let you choose the weapons,” Irex said. “Needles. Now it is to you to choose the time and place.” “My grounds. Tomorrow, two hours from sunset. That will give me time to gather the death-price.” This gave Kestrel pause. But she nodded, and finally turned to Arin. He looked nauseated. He sagged in the senators’ grip. It seemed they weren’t restraining him, but holding him up. “You can let go,” Kestrel told the senators, and when they did, she ordered Arin to follow her. As they left the library, Arin said, “Kestrel--” “Not a word. Don’t speak until we are in the carriage.” They walked swiftly down the halls--Arin’s halls--and when Kestrel stole sidelong looks at him he still seemed stunned and dizzy. Kestrel had been seasick before, at the beginning of her sailing lessons, and she wondered if this was how Arin felt, surrounded by his home--like when the eyes can pinpoint the horizon but the stomach cannot. Their silence broke when the carriage door closed them in. “You are mad.” Arin’s voice was furious, desperate. “It was my book. My doing. You had no right to interfere. Did you think I couldn’t bear the punishment for being caught?” “Arin.” Fear trembled through her as she finally realized what she had done. She strove to sound calm. “A duel is simply a ritual.” “It’s not yours to fight.” “You know you cannot. Irex would never accept, and if you drew a blade on him, every Valorian in the vicinity would cut you down. Irex won’t kill me.” He gave her a cynical look. “Do you deny that he is the superior fighter?” “So he will draw first blood. He will be satisfied, and we will both walk away with honor.” “He said something about a death-price.” That was the law’s penalty for a duel to the death. The victor paid a high sum to the dead duelist’s family. Kestrel dismissed this. “It will cost Irex more than gold to kill General Trajan’s daughter.” Arin dropped his face into his hands. He began to swear, to recite every insult against the Valorian’s the Herrani had invented, to curse them by every god. “Really, Arin.” His hands fell away. “You, too. What a stupid thing for you to do. Why did you do that? Why would you do such a stupid thing?” She thought of his claim that Enai could never have loved her, or if she had, it was a forced love. “You might not think of me as your friend,” Kestrel told Arin, “but I think of you as mine.

I seem to remember carrying him that evening to the window with uncommon tenderness (following the setting sun that was to take him away), and telling him with not unnatural bitterness that he had got to leave me because another child was in need of all his pretty things; and as the sun, his true father, lapt him in its dancing arms, he sent his love to a lady of long ago whom he called by the sweetest of names, not knowing in his innocence that the little white birds are the birds that never have a mother. I wished (so had the phantasy of Timothy taken possession of me) that before he went he could have played once in the Kensington Gardens, and have ridden on the fallen trees, calling gloriously to me to look; that he could have sailed on paper-galleon on the Round Pond; fain would I have had him chase one hoop a little way down the laughing avenues of childhood, where memory tells us we run but once, on a long summer-day, emerging at the other end as men and women with all the fun to pay for; and I think (thus fancy wantons with me in these desolate champers) he knew my longings, and said with a boy-like flush that the reason he never did these things was not that he was afraid, for he would have loved to do them all, but because he was not quite like other boys; and, so saying, he let go my finger and faded from before my eyes into another and olden ether; but I shall ever hold that had he been quite like the other boys there would have been none braver than my Timothy

But once the work was done, we sat down in a warm patch of Sunlight outside his house where the peonies were slowly coming into bloom, and the whole world seemed covered in a fine layer of gold leaf. “What have you done in life?” Boros suddenly asked. This question was so unexpected that I instantly let myself be carried away by memories. They began to sail past my eyes, and typically for memories, everything in them seemed better, finer, and happier than in reality. It’s strange, but we didn’t say a word. For people of my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist, the villages where they went on holiday, the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafés and houses of their past. And if their outer form has been preserved, it’s all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside it anymore. I have nowhere to return to. It’s like a state of imprisonment. The walls of the cell are the horizon of what I can see. Beyond them exists a world that’s alien to me and doesn’t belong to me. So for people like me the only thing possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a mirage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air. That’s what was going through my mind as we sat there in silence. It was better than a conversation. I have no idea what either of the men was thinking about. Perhaps about the same thing.

I don't know just where I'm going But I'm goin' to try for the kingdom if I can 'Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man When I put a spike into my vein Then I tell you things aren't quite the same When I'm rushing on my run And I feel just like Jesus' son And I guess I just don't know And I guess that I just don't know I have made very big decision I'm goin' to try to nullify my life 'Cause when the blood begins to flow When it shoots up the dropper's neck When I'm closing in on death You can't help me not you guys All you sweet girls with all your sweet talk You can all go take a walk And I guess I just don't know And I guess I just don't know I wish that I was born a thousand years ago I wish that I'd sailed the darkened seas On a great big clipper ship Going from this land here to that I put on a sailor's suit and cap Away from the big city Where a man cannot be free Of all the evils in this town And of himself and those around Oh, and I guess I just don't know Oh, and I guess I just don't know Heroin, be the death of me Heroin, it's my wife and it's my life Because a mainer to my vein Leads to a center in my head And then I'm better off than dead When the smack begins to flow Then I really don't care anymore About all the Jim-Jims in this town And everybody putting everybody else down And all of the politicians makin' crazy sounds All the dead bodies piled up in mounds, yeah Wow, that heroin is in my blood And the blood is in my head Yeah, thank God that I'm good as dead Ooohhh, thank your God that I'm not aware And thank God that I just don't care And I guess I just don't know And I guess I just don't know - Heroin

As it is my practice here to conceal nothing, I shall relate on this page the episode of the wall. Virigilia and Lobo Neves were soon to sail. Entering Dona Placida’s house, I saw on the table a folded piece of paper. It was a note from Virgilia. It said that she would be waiting for me in the garden at sundown, without fail. It concluded, “The wall is low on the side toward the little path.” I made a gesture of displeasure. The letter seemed to me extraordinary audacious, ill-considered, and even ridiculous. It not only invited scandal, it invited it together with laughter and sneers. I pictured myself leaping over the wall and caught in the act by an officer of the law, who led me off to jail. “The wall is low…” And what if it was low? Obviously Virgilia did not know what she was doing; perhaps by now she wished she had not sent the note. I looked at it, a small piece of paper, wrinkled by inflexible. I felt an urge to tear it in thirty thousand pieces and to throw it to the wind as the last vestige of my adventure; but I did not do so. Self-love, shame at the thought of fleeing from danger…There was no way out; I would have to go. “Tell her I’ll go.” “Where?” asked Dona Placida. “Where she said she would wait for me.” “She said nothing to me.” “In this note.” Dona Placida stared. “But this paper, I found it this morning in your drawer, and I thought that…” I felt a queer sensation. I reread the paper and looked at it a long time; it was, indeed an old note that Virgilia had sent me in the early days of our love, and I had leaped the cooperatively low wall and had met her in the garden. I had put the note away and…I felt a queer sensation.

I work as fast as I can. Binah will come soon looking for me. It’s Mother, however, who descends the back steps into the yard. Binah and the other house slaves are clumped behind her, moving with cautious, synchronized steps as if they’re a single creature, a centipede crossing an unprotected space. I sense the shadow that hovers over them in the air, some devouring dread, and I crawl back into the green-black gloom of the tree. The slaves stare at Mother’s back, which is straight and without give. She turns and admonishes them. “You are lagging. Quickly now, let us be done with this.” As she speaks, an older slave, Rosetta, is dragged from the cow house, dragged by a man, a yard slave. She fights, clawing at his face. Mother watches, impassive. He ties Rosetta’s hands to the corner column of the kitchen house porch. She looks over her shoulder and begs. Missus, please. Missus. Missus. Please. She begs even as the man lashes her with his whip. Her dress is cotton, a pale yellow color. I stare transfixed as the back of it sprouts blood, blooms of red that open like petals. I cannot reconcile the savagery of the blows with the mellifluous way she keens or the beauty of the roses coiling along the trellis of her spine. Someone counts the lashes—is it Mother? Six, seven. The scourging continues, but Rosetta stops wailing and sinks against the porch rail. Nine, ten. My eyes look away. They follow a black ant traveling the far reaches beneath the tree—the mountainous roots and forested mosses, the endless perils—and in my head I say the words I fashioned earlier. Boy Run. Girl Jump. Sarah Go. Thirteen. Fourteen . . . I bolt from the shadows, past the man who now coils his whip, job well done, past Rosetta hanging by her hands in a heap. As I bound up the back steps into the house, Mother calls to me, and Binah reaches to scoop me up, but I escape them, thrashing along the main passage, out the front door, where I break blindly for the wharves. I don’t remember the rest with clarity, only that I find myself wandering across the gangplank of a sailing vessel, sobbing, stumbling over a turban of rope. A kind man with a beard and a dark cap asks what I want. I plead with him, Sarah Go. Binah chases me, though I’m unaware of her until she pulls me into her arms and coos, “Poor Miss Sarah, poor Miss Sarah.” Like a decree, a proclamation, a prophecy. When I arrive home, I am a muss of snot, tears, yard dirt, and harbor filth. Mother holds me against her, rears back and gives me an incensed shake, then clasps me again. “You must promise never to run away again. Promise me.” I want to. I try to. The words are on my tongue—the rounded lumps of them, shining like the marbles beneath the tree. “Sarah!” she demands. Nothing comes. Not a sound. I remained mute for a week. My words seemed sucked into the cleft between my collar bones. I rescued them by degrees, by praying, bullying and wooing. I came to speak again, but with an odd and mercurial form of stammer. I’d never been a fluid speaker, even my first spoken words had possessed a certain belligerent quality, but now there were ugly, halting gaps between my sentences, endless seconds when the words cowered against my lips and people averted their eyes. Eventually, these horrid pauses began to come and go according to their own mysterious whims. They might plague me for weeks and then remain away months, only to return again as abruptly as they left.

The stench of the pigpens made him take shallow breaths. Michael desperately wanted another drink to drown his sorrows…or, more aptly, his angers. He promised himself that once he found the source of the problem, he’d head to Rigsby’s and let alcohol smooth the edge off his ire. Maybe with a few drinks in him, he could better handle Prudence. Nothing else I’ve tried has worked. “Michael!” At the sound of his wife’s voice, he stiffened. Speak of the devil. Is there a word for female devil? He couldn’t think of one. He nodded good-bye to Hong and was stepping away when--- “Michael, I want to talk to you!” Her voice rose until the timbre was almost a shriek. She ploughed pell-mell for him, her face red with anger. Hong ducked into his tent. Out of sight, maybe, but not out of earshot. The Guans’ should stuff cotton in their ears to block out the worst of Prudence’s screeches. “I need a drink,” he said, beginning to turn away. “Oh, dear Lord. Don’t tell me you’re a drunkard like that Obadiah Kettering. Is that another thing you omitted to tell me about your character?” He swung back. She was inches away, arms flung wide. “You omitted telling me I’d be marrying a shrew,” he said. “You should have written the word at the top of your fancy stationary in big block letters.” He sketched the word in the air and stated each letter. “S-H-R-E-W.” “Why…why I never!” Her mouth opened and closed as if she sought just the right words to hurl at him. “As for being a drunkard. Up until today, I only occasionally sought refuge in the bottle. But I think being married to you, my dear wife, will make me a frequent patron of Rigsbys Saloon. In fact, I might as well take up residence in the place.” Stepping forward, she brought up her hand to slap him. He leaped out of the way. Prudence missed, and her hand sailed past, making her off balance. Sure she was going to try again, Michael moved away, putting more space between them. Prudence slipped on a slimy rock and lost her balance, rotating and stepping sideways only to catch her heel in the hem of her skirt. She teetered backward toward the pigpen. Her legs hit the low fence, catching her at knee-height. Oh, no! Michael leaped to catch her. With a horrified expression, Prudence windmilled her arms in an effort to right herself. Michael missed, grabbing only a fold of her skirt. He yanked back, hoping to pull her upright, but instead, with a ripping sound, the fabric tore. The momentum toppled Prudence backwards into the pigpen, where she landed on her rump in the mire. “Grrrrrr!” She scooped up two handfuls of mud and flung them at him. Shocked, Michael didn’t dodge until the last minute, and the stinking mud went splat against his chest and face.

Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day- very much such a sweetness as this- I struck my first whale- a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty- forty- forty years ago!- ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without- oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!- when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before- and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare- fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!- when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts- away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow- wife? wife?- rather a widow with her husband alive? Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey- more a demon than a man!- aye, aye! what a forty years’ fool- fool- old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!- crack my heart!- stave my brain!- mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!- lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!” “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.