If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true – not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance.

Then he’s inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget.

I love you the way I love nightmare, secrets coming up like smoke through a grid, the way I love mirrors shattered but still whole, reflecting the foolish image in a hundred lit-up fragments. No one else could take me, pay my way with what your skin knows.

A song moves a story fast or slow like the river moves the water.

If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it’s not so bad.

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.

Towns change; they grow or diminish, but hometowns remain as we left them.

I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.

I wish I had more time to write.

As before, there is a great silence, with no end in sight. The writer surrenders, listening.