"what if there was an uncanny moment when all the birds were grounded from Cape Town to Juneau, and everywhere between--all feathers frozen in a universal stutter, so quick as to make a snail of light, and even Stephen Hawking's mind would miss it?"
"There’s a pressure at all hours of the day only a poem can assuage."
"...we’re not even really hiking,more like meandering in cinematic light."
"Sure, I watched the workmen come and lower large pieces of rotten sheetrock and lift new clean panels on a pulleyfrom that same window months ago, and I could have written then, but I must have sensed her coming, the smoker, so I waited."
"...you hold a poemthat functions half as personalnote and half as telescopeto the heightsawaiting us all."
"And the sculptors will shape the soil for the writers to stretch the seedsfor the patient painters who sketch the petals they will shade in alabaster and gold. Their sweat is the rain. Maybe the jazzman will send us a rose."
"Would it be enough to rock on a stormless sea with each our separate memories tuned to the state of the sinking sun?"
"I tell you once and for all—in front of the angel pictures on the wall, that I am not a host to load-bearing ghosts or headyentities, and if I was ever holy, I have fallen farinto the dense atmosphere of the living."
"She was so cool, as she knew, ankles crossed at the puckered hem of granite gray sweatpants, and she also knew I was watching from the open doorof the B train—watching her pose in apparent comfort at the girder of this city thoroughfare."
"Even the bees I'd swear were sent to protect us in the delicate business of hives and honey are stung to silence by the news that something winged has lost its flight."
"Dear Anonymous, I've got a secret I know you can keep it because you don't really exist....This is what shapes you, this is what makes you as authentic as you are fake."
"It was as if someone had leftthe bird thereas a kind of telegramof feathers, oily feathersthat looked like they’d struggled,shuttered a little before letting gointo flightforever."