Do not believe angels are easy. Instead, terrible, terrific in the oldest sense--the ground giving way beneath your feet.

A finger is a gun-- a wallet is a gun, skin a shiny pistol,a demon, a barrelalready ready--hands updon't shoot--

I was ten when Mike Smiley, half-Indian, skinny, brown-skinned, brought the word jigaboo to schoollike lunch, or the flu,fed him by his adopted white father who saidthat's what we calledthem then. By noon it was done--everyone had a name for what had beenbothering them, some thing utterly humanas hate.

We are not born with tears. Your first dozen cries are dry. It takes some time for the world to arrive and salt the eyes.

We were never young.

a calm that would undo most anyone who thought noise worse than its opposite

This world is rigged with ruin.

I have begun to believe in, and even to preach, a poetry of necessity. This is a recognition not just of the necessity of poetry to our lives, but also the fact that necessity is what drives most of the poetry that matters, or the way that it matters.

Every pore mourns. Not the brain, nor the chest where bereavement nests, but the body, whole--how it burns. The ache of new bone being grown.