The bitter heart eats its owner It's a fearful thing to love what death can touch
Their goodnight kiss felt like two blind animals bumping into each other in the dark She felt in that moment that she loved him as much as it was possible to love anyone What she felt was something like hard rain; violence and brightness and beauty What formed in her mouth were the words, Which of us is flawed?
He began to feel anger at the peace he found here and the complacency of the blue sky and quiet roads His fists were in his eye sockets, his head exploding with the ruin of lives As he set out, he felt a kind of happiness He fell and he fell, and the earth that we call sweet became his executioner
There is a point when the body relinquishes its pain and waits dumbly The savage animal eating his heart would someday grow weary When do you stop being human? When the body is so befouled, when you have groveled so deeply, when bitterness eats your bones?
The birds move from one tree to the next, building nests This is how we live The wind erases our footprints as we move And then one day, we are no longer alive on Earth, And the footsteps are gone forever The land is our blood, the clouds our hair
We are doorways, openings into something greater than ourselves, Something that we don’t understand and will never understand One cannot know why things happen as they do We have nothing precious in and of ourselves We are only precious that we are part of something too big to know Every person alive thinks they are the center of the universe, that they are everything When in fact each of us is less than nothing Liquid, like a river Season by season Hope, and hope again.
lines compiled from Eleanor Morse's novel White Dog Fell From The Sky