The Balance of Gravity (1999) by Marcel Antonio
I ainât scared of no wet, no wave. I done seen more than this. God is in all houses. Just balance the huge noun of Him on your tongue.
âPatricia Smith, â34â from Blood Dazzler
Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours. They dance in the attic and in Vienna. My hand is alive all over America. Not even death will stop it, death shedding her blood. Nothing will stop it, for this is the kingdom and the kingdom come.
âAnne Sexton, from âThe Touchâ
They walk along with us, to be sure, and yet see where their heads are: in that fog compounded of neon, gin, and mint emanating from the shop signs above them. Holland is a dream, monsieur, a dream of gold and smokeâsmokier by day, more gilded by night. And night and day that dream is peopled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily riding their black bicycles with high handle-bars, funereal swans constantly drifting throughout the whole land, around the seas, along the canals. Their heads in their copper-colored clouds, they dream; they cycle in circles; they pray, somnambulists in the fogâs gilded incense; they have ceased to be here. They have gone thousands of miles away, toward Java, the distant isle. They pray to those grimacing gods of Indonesia with which they have decorated all their shop windows and which at this moment are floating aimlessly above us before alighting, like sumptuous monkeys, on the signs and stepped roofs to remind these homesick colonials that Holland is not only the Europe of merchants but also the sea, the sea that leads to Cipango and to those islands where men die mad and happy.
âAlbert Camus, The Fall
