Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jum...p, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next--life teems the earth. And when that life is not rushing to escape, it is playing statues to do the same. See the hummingbird, there, not there. As thought arises and blinks off, so this thing of summer vapor; the clearing of a cosmic throat, the fall of a leaf. And where it was--a whisper. What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. In between the scurries and flights, what? Be a chameleon, ink- blend, chromosome change with the landscape. Be a pet rock, lie with the dust, rest in the rainwater in the filled barrel by the drainspout outside your grandparents' window long ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now I know that much of parenthood is watching and waiting for the chick to fall into harm's way, watching and waiting for the cat...s and the cold nights. The joyous enterprise has an undercurrent of terror.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What more is to love than I have loved? And if there be nothing more, O bright, O bright,... The chick, the chidder-barn and grassy chives And great moon, cricket-impresario, And, hoy, the impopulous purple-plated past, Hoy, hoy, the blue bulls kneeling down to rest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cry joy that this witchlike midwife second Bullies into rough seas you so gentle... And makes with a flick of the thumb and sun A thundering bullring of your silent and girl-circled island.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps-- Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,... Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why must it always end this way? A dais with woman reading, with the ruckus of her hair... And all that is unsaid about her pulling us back to her, with her Into the silence that night alone can't explain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The shadow of the Venetian blind on the painted wall, Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals,... Focus the tragic melancholy of the bright stare Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »