Worldly Things
Michael Kleber-Diggs
Top 10 Best Quotes
“After You Left the weight of your absence became a black hole revolving around my memory of you--itself a black hole. Wavelets wrinkled the sheer sheet of space and time. Father, the loss of you is a planet orbiting what might have been. I cannot say if the emptiness is a grand celestial body or a vacuum so complete nothing can escape. I know these forces have mass and motion that bends, calls in, ripples fabric-- distorts the pace of light for a billion years.”
“Come to my funeral dressed as you would for an autumn walk in the woods. Arrive on your schedule; I give you permission to be late, even without good cause. If my day arrives when you had other plans, please proceed with them instead. Celebrate me there--keep dancing.”
“I woke to the news you were dead. The what arrived before daylight; the how was agony unfolding as I dreaded my way to dusk. Unfolding against my want not to know (but I already knew, have known since I could know): officers, arrest, Black, man, twenty, video, knee, sir, back, dollar, 8, counterfeit, hands, sorry, 46, mama, please, breathe, please! Were you tired George? I feel tired sometimes. America on my neck--my lungs compressed so much they can't expand/contract--”
“just then a little black ant struggles by alone, alone. And in that moment, I want us to give ourselves over to industry, carry the weight of the day together, lighten it. I want to be a part of a colony where I feel easy walking around. Cool as the goddamn breeze. Where I can breathe, build structures sturdier and grander than this—but the woman crosses to the other side of the street, and I do what I usually do: retreat into myself as far as I can, then send out whatever’s left.”
“My love, I make this to tell you-- you made me right: everything is amplified. Joy doubles, also pain. The endless work of the river, the haze around it.”
“My grandfather's name was Arthur, and he talked all the time about his arthritis but pronounced it autha-itis, so for months I thought it was a condition unique to him, that he had his own special burden, just like my brother and me.”
“Love is history plus desire. Love is dominion. It is supposed to attack you. When you send it out, it stings you back like a slap of cold air.”
“In America there’s one winning story—no adaptations. The Story imagines a noble, grand progress where we’re all united. Like truths are as self-evident as the Declaration states. Or like they would be if not for detractors like me, the ranks of Vagabonds existing to point out what’s rotten in America, Insisting her gains come at a cost, reminding her who pays, and Negating wild notions of exceptionalism—adding ugly facts to God’s-favorite-nation mythology.”
“Here's the deal: structural fatigue eventually causes breakdowns. I am 50 and chaos. My whole body groans.”
“Fog borne of fatigue, fog of early morning, of restless middle-years sleeplessness, fog of cat hair in my eye, of dog, dogs, fog of darkness, fog of dreary days under a pseudo-autocracy, funk fog of high crimes and misdemeanors, fog of my daily compulsion toward work I do not want to do.”
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Book Keywords:
life, burdens, desire, pain, marriage, death-of-a-father, black-lives-matter, middle-age, loss-of-a-father, poetry, celebration-of-life, racism, arthritis, love, grandfathers, declaration-of-independence, america, police-brutality, death, breakdowns, community, 50, mourning, attacks, structural-fatigue, black-men, systemic-racism, aches, loss, poem, struggles, poems, constitution, fog, grief, aging, funerals, sleeplessness, joy, george-floyd, history, suspicion, dominion, african-americans, fathers
