“what about her? Is the kingdom of heaven only a step from her also and will the passions of the earth at a single movement of her heart fall back and bow their heads as she passes?”

From The Visitor, in The Miner’s Pale Children by W.S. Merwin. It’s more like a short short story, whereas some of the pieces in the book read like dreams, like In a Dark Square, which ends this way:

He wonders what will happen if it starts to be day. The little lights, then, will still burn over the doors. They will grow yellow and fade as a new day brightens the lie numbers and he sees (for the first time, as he says) that each of the doors is crossed with colored ribbons, like a gift-wrapped package, complete with a huge bow and flowers. Then what? Are they really, all of them, presents sent from the old relatives whom he has never seen, the aunties, the grannies, the eyeless, the toothless, who have never seen him and yet presume to say what his whole life is to be? Will he finally (for the cold of the morning is terribly penetrating, after a night with no sleep, in the open) walk up the few steps, feeling a monument toppling inside him, and set his hand deliberately to the end of one of the ribbons, and undo the bow in the full knowledge that whatever that package contains will be his for the rest of his life?

“No,” he says, thinking of the day warming up sooner or later and everything starting to resume just where it left off. “No,” he says, “we have nothing to do with each other.”

And though no one is listening he repeats aloud to the darkness that he will continue to put all his faith in himself.

“Feeling a monument toppling inside him.” Oh, man.

Not all of the pieces work for me, some feel too forced — always the risk when prose sidles so close to the poetic. But the ones that do work are simply wrenching.