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The chickens are circling and blotting out the day. The sun is bright, but the chickens are in the way. Yes, the sky is dark with chickens, dense with them. They turn and then they turn again. These are the chickens you let loose one at a time and small— various breeds. Now they have come home to roost—all the same kind at the same speed.
From The Niagara River by Kay Ryan, published by Grove Press. Copyright © 2005 by Kay Ryan. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
It’s hard for
the master
sharpener after
all that work
to have the shaft
taken for the point.
People run themselves
Montaigne
You can oversell
the sea, say, or
the way we miss
the dead. The littlest
bit of absence excites
oceans. And of oceans
the less said the
better: the wet beyond
the land: we have a
Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time.
W.G. Sebald, A Place in the Country
There is a webby and
exalted state of
comprehension wherein
discrete events—like the
rigging lights of separate
boats upon a midnight
ocean—suggest a net: