Claire Triplett The Road - Golden Lines Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal

light, shuffling through the ash, each the others world entire. -6 Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget. -12 Gods own firedrake. The sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark. Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground. 31 If you break little promises youll break big ones. -34 Im sorry, he said. -54 We used to talk about death, she said. We dont anymore. Why is that? I dont know. Its because its here. -56 She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift. - 58 So be it. Evoke the forms. Where youve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them. -74 Because were the good guys. Yes. And were carrying the fire. And were carrying the fire. Yes. Okay. -120 Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. -130 Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground. - 196 And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands. Slept but a sea apart on another beach among the bitter ashes of the world or stood in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun. -219 You have to stay near, he said. You have to be quick. So you can be with him. Hold him close. Last day of earth. - 250

He could tell by his breathing that the boy was awake and after a while the boy said But we did kill him. -260 What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment?? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt. -261 They went on. In the nights sometimes now hed wake in the black and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun. -272 Perhaps in the worlds destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence. -275 She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time. -286