Quotes from Landis Everson

Among the valleys of the distant waves we will eventually meet. […] The orange sun will recognize us. It owes us. It will be the sun from nineteen hundred and forty-forever. O no cloud in the sky! O ocean full of fish hiding! The sun seduced us before we could be virgins.

I try to describe you to the river. I say you're a snag— Something the river can understand—catching my heart, That I'm rowing without oars, that this is some trip, Never able to leave you, bracing hard against swirls That confuse me, that the whole ghostly place seems like a trap Without bait, that nothing arrives anyplace near Where you and I once wanted to be. from "The Little Ghosts I Played with

I don't believe in love anymore, the foghorn blasted it out of me.

I guess love first requires empty arms with a sun between them before clouds start to fill spaces.

I can't open both arms and catch falling towers, catch trees, catch helpless oceans or drowning things. I hold out empty arms because you refuse to fall into them. Every bit of you inside won't come out, which is the way of a heart hatching. This stubornness insists I love you while I hold no act of God responsible.

I carry a map case full of scenarios because like sand it can give me traction when words from another intention ask to come in and the dictionary yells out they are liars.

If there appeared a stranger to you bending down for a kiss unexpectedly would you walk without clothes out of the mirror's view to discover if it is you who are the true stranger you promised yourself to. Does your face open on hinges and inside two strangers entwine and a trumpet sings out each time you look out of the space left out when your eyes shine in.

You aren't the only ones who have been out there and come back. Lyons and zephrys and dead flower arrangements climb up the trellys to reach Heaven and fail. Fall right at my feet and stay there.

The birds swoop nearer. They are gulls. Why, then, We must be close to the ocean! Indeed, The sounds of your music come clearly, Composing themselves in the air. It was written, I think, that I'd find you Against some sort of crazy crashing backdrop That could go on forever, being an awful bore, Then change into a storm. But the birds atilt, Hung in the sky like little notes ranging, the birds Atilt have no connection with music.

You can also imagine a moon shining even if there wasn't a moon, even if I imagined there was a moon lighting up the dark sky for us, and you, instead, could imagine only a dawn, even if there wasn't a dawn, eclipsed, with no love in it.