Wish I had bought the book....
Men, even gods-in-men’s-skin, believe passion means (*to adore, to lust, to be exalted through love.*) They are foolish. Passion means to suffer. It means (*to endure great sorrows.*) Passion is the grasp of blister-ridden hands, breaking its thumbnails on the floor of heaven. (*Passion is fear, like a peach tree planted in the navel, when your sister comes not wandering back over the cicada-emboldened hills.*) It is hoarse, needling, the great iron vat in which flesh becomes oil. (*It is eyes floating in murk, eyes crusted in salt like tears.*) Its pelt is deep-shaded, like love - red and black, wine-dregs and sour mash - but it is (*not*) love. (*But then, then you said it was, when you opened for me.*) Passion cannot weep. The trackers of once-liquid sorrows run down its face, jaundiced and leprose-rose, a warm line of marrow-dust pooling on its collarbone like the burst bow of a violin. (*Passion cannot weep, but oh, oh, it cries!*) Passion hollows bones to flutes and seeds the flesh with baobabs, baobabs and women like baobabs, dark and deep in the muscle walls, growing like recalcitrant children, gnashing their agate teeth at intestines of twisted irony. (*I gnash, you gnash, we gnash at each other and eat each other and swallow and excrete each other and look at our passion, look how it gleams, look at the peachstones of our suffering in these caves!*)
The Grass-Cutting Sword - Catherynne Valente (c) 2006