Book: White Oleander

My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They're like women, it said. They begin with little girls, streams in bright flowers. Then they grow up, turn into rapid streams, pave paths in granite, throw themselves from the rocks, fearless, unstoweet. Then they are distributed, become calm and businesslike, goods and different garbage float along wide smooth turns. But in the dark depths of the unconscious grow huge som, reaching the size of a barge. Once every hundred years, storms occur, rivers take back their words, change marriage vows and flood the banks. Finally they exhale, devastated by childbirth, and turn into vast swamps adjacent to the sea.

Why do people kill those who leave them? Because they are suffocated by pain and anger, and they cannot bear these feelings.

The artist is a phoenix, he needs to burn in order to rise again.

But you can't get rid of me so easily, cut off all ties. I live in you, in your bones and skin, in the whimsical twists of your thoughts. It was I who made you who you are. I have shaped your feelings and moods, the blood in your veins whispers my name. Even when you rebel, you still remain mine.

If a poet utters beautiful words, this does not mean that they are true.

That's what I would write about if I were a poet– those who work at night. About guys unloading cars, about nurses on duty with their affectionate hands, about night employees in hotels, about taxi drivers, about waitresses in round-the-clock cafes. They understand a lot. They know how valuable it is that someone remembers your name, they know the comfort of the usual rhetorical questions - "How is life? Like children?" They know how long a night can be. They know what sound the departing life makes - it quietly clicks like a glass door closed in a draft. Night workers live without illusions - wipe other people's dreams from the tables, load weights, return to the airport for the last remaining passenger.

What does beauty give if you're not going to use it as a key or as a hammer? Just a toy for other people, an object of use or admiration. Or contempt and envy. A pretext for a dream, like a picture on a white wall.

You become attached to anyone who shows even the slightest attention to you.

Only footmen should apologize, she taught me. Never apologize, never explain anything.

Beauty was my mother's law, her religion. You can do whatever you want if you're beautiful, if you do it beautifully. If not, you just don't exist.

In the round wall mirror flashed our long white hair, blue eyes. Ancient Scandinavian women. When I looked at me and my mother like this, I could easily remember fishing in the deep cold seas, the smell of cod, the coal of our fires, leather shoes and our strange alphabet, rough runes, a language similar in sound to plowing a field.

Mother was like a beautiful woman dragging her sore leg, and that leg was me. I was a brick sewn into the hem of her dress, I was a heavy steel shirt.

Even sitting next to her, she was so often out of reach.

Light skin and eyes came to us from the ancient Scandinavians. Hairy savages who hacked their gods into pieces and hung meat from trees. We are the ones who plundered Rome. Those who are afraid only of old age and death in their own bed.