Sublime

His eyes, staring up into the abyss, had gone flat like deflated balloons. If a lover’s eyes are a clear mountain lake, Byron’s were a stagnant pond. His mouth twisted open in a silent scream.

the wife of an arriviste who had not arrived.

Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?

He was a gaunt young man who seemed suspicious of conversation that strayed outside certain unspecified guidelines.

Back in Brooklyn, a poet-nurse to the Union dying writes: A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. Jørgen never reads these words.

“The deepest regret is death. The only thing to face is death. This is all I think about. There’s only one issue here. I want to live.”

Life is death, and death is a kind of life.”