Status Updates From The Great Fires: Poems, 198...

“When I hear men boast about how passionate
they are, I think of the two cleaning ladies
at a second-story window watching a man
coming back from a party where there was
lots of free beer. He runs in and out
of buildings looking for a toilet. “My Lord,”
the tall woman says, “that fellow down there
surely does love architecture.”

"Love is not enough. We die and are put into the earth forever. We should insist while there is still time."

"We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars."

"Newness strutting around as if it were significant. / Irony, neatness, and rhyme pretending to be poetry. / I want to go back to the time after Michiko's death / when I cried every day among the trees. To the real. / To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive."

"I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can."

"How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite."