But instead of thinking about my book and how to write it, as I go pacing the floor, I fall to counting my footsteps until I feel about to go mad.
—Thomas Bernhard
1. The mute face of a doll, its eyes clicking open and shut, often seems melancholy.
2. To the furtive raven, head at a cant, the contingent world—a bit of dental floss, say, or slick offal on hot tar—is opportunity, a delight.
3. “Everything’s going to seed,” the grandfather would declare each fall, pointing at the long garden behind his house.
4. Felling a tree and seeing the cut end—tonight’s moon, wrote the haiku master, apprehending at once the sour scent of fresh wood and the joy of gazing at the moon—the light, the man, the rabbit—not glowing but reflecting, indifferent to the lunacy and worship from down here.
5. A ghost from some distant land is not always punctual.
6. Roosting on the edge of the bed one night, the long-dead brother, rawboned and sooty, refuses to answer his elderly sister’s questions, “Just like he always did,” she says.
7. Flesh is no phoenix.
8. Once, from the windows of a train curving through dusk toward a distant town, a child shivered at the odd vision of trees racing by and then the figure of a man, barely visible in a receding field.
9. The desire of Frankenstein’s detested creature, alone and tender under the shade of trees, is triggered by, among other wonders, the songs that emerge from the throats of birds.
10. The vagrant mind of the writer, unable to sleep, is in fact my mind.
11. Each darkened house along the many streets bears an icing of early snow.
12. On freezing winter afternoons, the once-feral cat avoids the back door, sleeping for hours on a pizza box by the heater vent and occasionally tracing a path between the blanket chest and a tall bookcase.
13. The gods crouch in their separate texts, waiting.
14. Down where the creek meets the two rivers, the grandmother wraps Christmas lights around the wind-shaped cedar, a chain of extension cords leading back to the porch and the children watching within.
15. For the day, the week, the year, an inarticulate mouth murmurs.
16. Walk all morning, pausing to examine the drawings of garish hearts taped to the windows of the closed school, or to check a snowplow stuck in the icy ditch beside the Open Door Fellowship, or to rest at the Stop and Go under its blinking sign announcing Candy, Candy.
17. Four concrete steps rise from the middle of an empty lot near the train tracks.
18. Hiding in the garden, the girl in the green coat crumples the dried pole beans, her fingers moving in a knot of papery foliage.
19. Imagine the boredom of the ferryman, collecting coin after coin from the open mouths of the dead.
20. I am not a god, but I play one in my mind.