The October Country

From the age of twelve I knew I was in a life and death match, winning every time I finished a new story, threatened with extinction on those days I did not write.

She had snapped her hand back, hoping he hadn’t heard the movement of her silent reaching.

The lungs did not rest but were exercised as if she were a drowned person and she herself performing artificial respiration to keep the last life going.

If only he could speak with her and she to him tonight, how good the night might be, and how easy to breathe and how lax the vessels of blood in her ankles and in her wrists and the under-arms,

and the eighth died in love

How talented was death

the twenty-second was never loved

In order for a thing to be horrible it has to suffer a change you can recognize

Once in a lifetime anyway, it’s nice to make a mistake if you think it’ll do somebody some good,

I’m madly in love with him, if you must know.