The Clinamen Improvisations

Lucretius: We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.

Seeds of the neighbor's tree of heaven feather and clump like armpithair in the boughs. Winded, they fidget, they wheel, part estimateof da Vinci's medieval dreams as part nature's cocktail umbrellaslittering your stoop and the sidewalk where just now a marshal hasunhoused that same neighbor's furnishings and clothes. The facesin windows will tsk for shame you don't mind your business, thatyou choose now to sweep leavings from that steroidal weed, BettySmith's metaphor for growing up in Brooklyn. No dustpan can managesuch waste. The tree outdates even your first pair of parachutepants. We are each of us agents flashing our badges: the water readermetering the root-stabbed main; the "stand and deliver" look of grouphome girls as realtors parade like evangelicals; and you, standing therelike you own the place. You'd love to ladder with a handsaw, shed eachbranch that stirs a puddle of wind before wind again shakes the treelike a sack of popcorn and the steambag bursts. Go on and sweep.Let your cares chitter in the tree and imp their wings on limbs thatbear the weight of so many useless metaphors and stories.

Deleuze & Guattari: Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand.

Raise your eyes along the spires of Green-Wood Cemeteryor stand on the ball fields of Brooklyn College in Hopperesquelight. Quaker Parrots will appear to you like the visionsof St. Francis, lift the snatches of sound woven to make theirvoices and call to you from their nests, a nation of cheertrumpets and conch shells, a frenzied population of twitchingtoes. They seduce us not simply with their tropical verve. Listeninto the feathered shrubbery of their heat: they're chatteringlines from Emma Lazarus; they're trading fours on "Salt Peanuts";they're stage-wailing their cousin, the Carolina Parrot, a flourishon ladies headgear. Who flushed them from their ancestral treesof Argentina? What love sustained the cargo of their bodies—whether to market or exile—such distance? What stirred themthen to steal, unlawful as weather, further across the man-drawnmap? If we ask why Brooklyn, we can hear only our own reply:if not here, where? then tease a final query from our minds likethread from a lawn chair, parroting Hillel: And if not now, when?

Cervantes: If it answers no other purpose, this long catalogue of authors will serve to give a surprising look of authority to your book.

Marion, Shane, Aaron, Camille, Ruth-e, Skoog, Duriel, Holly,Matejka, Jess, Q, Major, Sandra, TSE, Che, Jennifer, Ravi,Joseph, Willie, Tracy, Tina, Ilya, Patricia, Jonathan, Cathy, Sue,Melissa, Rigoberto, Ada, Jen, Eisa, Kazim, Natasha, Singer, Dan,Kyle, Terrance, James, Sean, Elizabeth, Michael & Matthew,Erica D., Cate, Lyrae, Beckman, Jason & Michael, Brenda, Oliver,Amaud, Pavlic, Rosal, Joel, Susan, Nicky, Evie, Roger, Kevin,Sebastian, Latasha, Xochi, Ben, Stacey Lynn, Shafer, Sarah,Shenoda, Paula, Patrick, Aracelis, Mark, Nick, Craig (R.I.P.),Murillo, Priscilla, Gabrielle, G. C., Jericho, Monica, Christian,Keene, Doug, Vievee, Matthea, Prageeta, Van, Robin, Miguel,Dwayne, Ronaldo, Graber, Deborah, Uche, Alan, Mark, Tess,Matt, Kiaran, Frank X., Sherwin, Ross, Adam, Bino, Caitlin, Fred,Carl, Jenny, Randall, Tonya, Sharan, Cynthia, Eireann, Paula,Dawn, Mytili, Zapruder, Alex, Stuart, Katy, Anselm, Sedarat,Rich, Dante, Mark, Rebecca, Crystal, Erica W., Honoree, Khalil,Jill, Myronn, Lillian, Marty, Cecily, Tara, Mendi, John & Joe

Alfred North Whitehead: I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine.

Quotation marks tweeze text and lift it to gild the voiceof the speaker. Anonymous quotes bestow mystique likea Venetian carnival mask that obscures in order to license.(Carne Vale: farewell to flesh.) Chancing on a fetish for thebasis of taste, cannibals dined by firelight on the tongueof the sacrifice. You? Incarnate the page, give words the bodyyou consume...