51 Quotes by Kate Braverman

They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?

Los Angeles, brutal claustrophobic basin of delusion and ripoff, clutter, eerie, sticky, horrible. They came, they saw and wend blind. O hallucination of urban gray slabs. . . . Poor ruined sunsore and sadness for demented City of Angels, of white torment and hideous albino predator birds.

Los Angeles. . . . It was some sort of organic ruin, an accident of architecture and brutal necessity. The iridescence was somehow almost legible, suggesting a calligraphy of exposed bone, transparencies, experimental skin grafts. The blood of Los Angeles was a red neon wash, a kind of sea of autistic traffic lights.

I am learning how to mother. . . . I am distilling entire moral universes into single lines.

It is all stone upon stone, one at a time, relentless as cells. . . . And stone is the DNA of the exterior world.

My father is taking me to my first baseball game. The Philadelphia Athletics are playing. I feel I've been sitting on my strange hard seat for a long time. I stand up. It is the National Anthem."I want to go home now," I tell my father.He is looking down at the big green field. "But the game hasn't started yet," he says.Then he shrugs. He laughs and his laughter is big like the wind. "O.K., kid. O.K."And he takes my by the hand and leads me out of the stadium.

This southern city which seems only peripherally and accidentally America. This city which was once an outpost of Spain and once a region of Mexico. This city webbed with boulevards bearing the names of Spanish psychotics and saints. This incomplete city which seems to have no recognizable past, no ground that could be called unassailably sacred. This incomplete city that speaks of an impending terror.

Suddenly she wants to fall to her knees and pray for the poets. She imagines them with immaculate ravaged faces, with necklaces of ransacked moons, with teeth which are black stubs. Poets are collections of unused crescents and bandages, confused images and terrible departing.

It is always a poet's winter.