Bokelskere.no

hvis en nabo i byen blir drept, merkes det ikke like godt. Det er ikke sikkert man får vite om det engang, for det er så mange andre mennesker som suser forbi, så mange som kommer og går.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Some fathers hate to read but love to take the family on trips. Some children hate trips but love to read. Funny how often these find themselves passengers in the same automobile. I glimpsed the stupendous clear-cut shoulders of the Rockies from between paragraphs of Madam Bovary. Cloud shadows roved languidly across her huge rock throat, traced her fir flanks. Since those days I do not look at hair on female flesh without thinking, Deciduous?

Noen ganger later det til at jeg er omgitt av optimister.

I varmen sover høsten i et vintereplekart.
Hun nynner, tryller sola ned, gjør natta myk og svart.

Håret er en solnedgang der storm og stillhet bor.
Klærne lukter eplesøtt, og pusten er som jord.

Tenk, hele den store, tykke jord ligger og stirrer opp på en med den forferdeligste motstand.

Enkelte dager forbeholdes menneskene til den dumpe lidelse som ingen vet hvor kommer ifra. Da ligger hele jorden og stirrer på en med motstand.

They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust

Jeg vil komme
deg så nær

pupillene dine
skal utvide seg

så store
at jeg kan krype inn
og sette meg
på netthinnen din
og bli der

There is nothing better than love's beginning:
all the poems say so. Less is said
of the long afterwards,
after that shiver has gone still
as my looking glass.

Don't be seduced by the gods,
my daughter.

Though you break
into song beneath them

you will remain broken.

det er en fin tur hvis det ikke er noen andre ute

jeg står ved siden av en stor rød regnvåt postkasse i denne byen som jeg aldri har stått i tidligere og aldri skal stå i igjen og jeg bare fikk det for meg at du ligger der inne, bretta sammen og frankert, adressert og konvoluttert, og det er ikke torden, var det jeg ville si, det er bare neven min, og det er ikke en møkkatsunami, bare resten av kaffe latten
(22:45)

The second day I was in Texas. I was traveling through the part where the flat-footed, bilious, frog-sticker-toting Baptist biscuit-eaters live. Then I was traveling through the part where the crook-legged, high-heeled, gun-wearing, spick-killing, callous-rumped sons of the range live and crowd the drugstore on Saturday night and then all go round the corner to see episode three of "Vengeance on Vinegar Creek," starring Gene Autry as Borax Pete. But over both parts, the sky was tall hot brass by day and black velvet by night, and Coca Cola is all a man needs to live on. Then I was traveling through New Mexico, which is a land of total and magnificent emptiness with a little white filling station flung down on the sand like a sun-bleached cow skull by the trail, with far to the north a valiant remnant of the heroes of the Battle of Montmartre in a last bivouac wearing huaraches and hammered silver and trying to strike up conversations with Hopis on street corners. Then Arizona, which is grandeur and the slow incredulous stare of sheep, until you hit the Mojave. You cross the Mojave at night and even at night your breath rasps your gullet as though you were a sword swallower who had got hold of a hack-saw blade by mistake, and in the darkness the hunched rock and towering cactus loom at you with the shapes of a visceral, Freudian nightmare.
Then California.