Resurrection
Read softly, slowly, to yourself or to another. Feel the movements of your mouth, feel the air on your lips. Know or explore each word:
"Everything begins with an inhale and exhale, and never ends, moment after moment, yourself inhaling, and exhaling, seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, moving, sleeping, waking, day after day and year after year, until it is now, this moment, the moment of your being, the last moment, which is saddest and most glorious."
The boy knows death well.
He says, I am of you, I come from the turns you have attacked me with, the smell of your passing movements leaves bruises on my breath, takes pieces of my breath, ‘inhale and newness, exhale and new death,’ I am a boy at your godlessness, a boy in my own.
He thinks, Inimicable hand that lets go, not even you will stay by my side after you take all the nutrients, the food of my days, all that is beautiful in me, not even you will watch the curl of my spine, not even you will listen to the inharmonic bond between rage and fragile will, between fond memories and regrets. Godlessness: there is no difference: pain on one side and pain on the other.
He says, Take me, take me, take me, because, already, you have taken my limbs and what is life if I cannot run, if I cannot embrace, if I cannot fight.
Pause. Hold your breath, he thinks. With death there cannot be life, cannot be love. But here it is. I feel it hold me close, its fingertips dig into my muscles. Moments once dead are no longer through the life of my memory. Deathless because of my memory. All is resurrected with life, this life that has love, this love that is worth all the pains of life, he thinks…
He says, I am of you but I do not return to you, not yet.
He is ‘another boy alive on earth, seeking the essential truth of the scene, seeking the static and precise beneath that which is in motion and which is imprecise.’
It is private, ‘the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one man.’
The boy knows that death, somehow, is not death at all.
Copper Avila
1994-2008
Rest in Our Thoughts
Quotations from Resurrection of a Life by William Saroyan
Posts
5 Comments
July 26, 2008 at 9:22 AM
Wonderful :)
July 26, 2008 at 9:23 AM
and touching
July 26, 2008 at 10:54 PM
BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!!!!!!! :) One of my fav...but ill prob say that after every new one i read.
<3
RIP COPPER
July 27, 2008 at 9:24 AM
Your words leave the markings of love not often encountered in this world. You loved Copper as he was also beginning to grow attached to you. Although your time with him was short he absolutely needed you in his life.
One day you will again hear the tapping of his toes on the floor as he walks his way toward you.
August 5, 2008 at 9:56 PM
Wow, I absolutely love this piece and writing style. While reading the words, they really flowed and danced off my tongue and I was lost into the rhythm. I loved it. :)
And the pictures are fresh and alive.
r.i.p Copper A.
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