"The scent of spikenard
is nice. It smells of
weird responsibility."

-Mary Ruefle, Spikenard. 

excerpt from my annotation on mary ruefle.

"The world is wide & black stretching out before you… like falling asleep in a far-away field & waking up at midnight to see nothing but statuesque darkness in every direction. The time I was swept off the rocks at the beach by what my mother called a “sneaker wave” & almost drown in less than three feet of water because my brain couldn’t register which direction was up. 

I keep thinking of it as ash. The moments after the volcanic eruption in which all the noise has stopped, & the ash wafts down like blurry snow. I’ve never been in a volcanic eruption, but I’ve seen pictures: my mother standing in her prom dress on the front lawn—the sky grey above her."

-nr

"but he is the peripheral sort
and not at the center of anything."


-mary ruefle, lapland