The morning is dark blue, hung with grey fog. Trees disappear, they blur into dogwood brush and wild rose tangles and faded long grass, stark limbs clawing at the air, drawing apart the sky, to imprint their mark. Cottonwoods and poplar and birch, layered in the hierarchy of pattern.
Life is decision, made and constantly remade.
Or it is how we deal with structure.
Last night, i could have gone upstairs to make coffee, retreat to my room, and tried to break free of the net which has stopped me from writing since september 19th, or put on mittens, scarf, and walked for hours, back-country roads under the white moon cut at its diagonal, warm winds and black ice, or cleaned my room, excavated the palace uthman has created under my bed, or sat on a carpet and tried to focus, or started in at the growing pile of editing commissions, or restarted arabic notes, or read until the early hours of morning, was the next inexorable step, the thorns, honour guard, lining a path strewn with dry and soulless leaves.
Three days after the completion of the house, a thunderstorm struck the city. The storm was so severe and sudden that Qadir, who was sleeping on the roof, didn’t have time to wake up; struck by lightening, his body turned to ash. It rained all night and his ashes were carried away by the water. The next morning his shoes were found near the charred charpoy. Had it not been for the shoes, his disappearance would have remained a mystery.
- muzaffar iqbal, uprooting
The world was being hoaxed by a disciplined melancholy. All the sketches made a virtue of longing. All that was necessary to be loved widely was to publish one’s anxieties. The whole enterprise of art was a calculated display of suffering.
- leonard cohen, the favourite game. "poetry is a verdict, not an occupation"
does not know of its enclosure, only that daylight
has been divided into shade and erratic patches
of colour, that the wind that carried it in has died.
These are aspects of change, not division...
- michael debeyer, change in a razor-backed season
