You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. Its invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.

We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.

I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.