“Claude didn’t sound every note. He must’ve been playing from memory. There is an unguarded quality in musicians unaware of listening ears. Intimate, hearing the piece like that, played for no one, played from far away, the sound escaping onto a stairwell presumed empty. Sheherazade spun out her tales over a thousand and one Arabian nights. Her tales were her demand for life: I deserve to live so long as I can unravel such intrigue into the world. do not kill me now. Do not strangle me at dawn.

I wondered if that trapped animal of a boy had left off rocking to listen. That pitiful youth, did he understand rapture? There was a terrible pain across my chest. It was the old pain, the old loss. This paper room at the top of the stairs in which, yesterday, my father had been, and now this unassuming beauty welling out of it, unbidden. Sunlight was spilling through the glass door on to the landing; the dust motes might have been there since time began. It was all immensely delicate and just beyond my reach. There were pockets of wonder all over the earth, I knew, like wild animals in glades, and I happened upon them now and then. Less so in America, because it was not my home, but there were pockets in America too, and I prized them all the more for their rarity. Once I blundered into them, the wonder took flight; it evaporated like dew. It was a matter of not blundering into them, of letting them be, of trying to live on the brink of them without intruding.”

- Claire Kilroy, (tenderwire: A Novel)
- photo by meg cebula copyright 2010

“Now I think of the starling flocks that move across the stripped winter landscape at home; how you’ll hear and look up to this great rush of birds, lifting and diving and turning. I think of the ravens, afloat on the air streams. Of the crows, going home at the fade of light, hundreds on hundreds, flowing and flowing, the winter sky filled with their tide.

Dark birds, ruffianly dark birds, stronger than birds of light and better survivors. They are the undervoice, scavenging life, living off gleanings. Uncivilised. Shameless. Outside the law. They allow the return of the soul.”
— Kerry Hardie (The Bird Woman: A Novel)

breathe
wicklow mountains, ireland

pigeons of st. stephen’s green
dublin, ireland

you can’t stop now

- alice hoffman
~ thanks alice