Quotes by Jim Carroll

For Elizabeth

It is winter ending on earth. The planets align tomorrow in March and grow more distant from the sun and each other like stray, worn soldiers retreating from an enemy that no longer exists. It is a mild spring in purgatory. In green limbo the children whose foreheads are dry, whose hands do not grow, are transformed themselves to seasons of birds circling an obelisk of shivering mercury. None are allowed prey, none are allowed heaven's crooked beak. They are radiant swallows with thorns for tongues to feed on the shifting mercury from the mythology of God's hand, which I cannot break, even now, under this tearful scrutiny. I've tried. I've tried. I am allowing to pass through me a statement of death. You, the catalyst of such distorted memory. In that limbo the children move in some strange gravity within and outside Grace. Their Lord is angry. They have died with their innocence untested. None knows what it has been or will be ~ each day it changes without changing ~ do you understand what I am saying? It is the life you chose on this Earth, the life of junk and lies. But that wasn't You, I knew You ~ you had perfect lips, eyes like a true child, your breasts unformed, an incandescent mind. This place where I put you now, it is a cursed season, an awkward line, a flawed circle, a snake on fire devouring what tomorrow it will itself become.