Rob Baker > Recent Status Updates

Only if I move my arm a certain way,
it comes back.
Or the way the light bends in the trees
this time of year,
so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart...

...But they guard me, these small pains,
from growing sure
of myself and perhaps forgetting.

--from "To Hear the Falling World", 48

One of the hijackers bought his airplane ticket a couple of days before 9/11, and he signed up for a Frequent Flyer account.

They use the term "static" 'to describe the confusion, inconsistencies, and sheer volume of intelligence, which makes it very difficult to pick out ahead of time the few items that seem in retrospect to be crucial' (129).

"......Einstein called time what stops everything
from happening at once" (25).

In 1996, bin Laden issued a fatwa calling on "'every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewared to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.'

"'The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it'" (90).

"Like most of the passengers on flight 93, Jeremy Glick led a life striking for its openness.

That is what puts him in such stark contrast with the group of dark, clandestine figures who killed him and the 39 other people on flight 93. We cannot comprehend the people who perpetrated the crime, even as the people it was perpetrated against seem so guileless, almost innocent of the dark forces that destroyed them."

"A day just ends

Its dusk comes simply
without opinion or hesitation.

A fork still fits hand,
shoes fit feet,
on this day, like any other.

She closed her eyes,
opened her mouth
to receive the end of her life.

It's last tasting" (18).

Although yesterday I went to the library and got four books, I decided first to pick up a book I've had sitting on my shelves for years.

"Today, when I could do nothing,
I saved an ant....

It must have first walked
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant" (10).

"I studied much and remembered little.
But the world is generous, it kept offering figs and cheeses" ("Tin", 5)

"Then one morning everything changed" (275).

Giant turning points in peopel's lives are always so interesting and instructional to read about.

“It’s a thousand times harder to come back then to become” (242).

Was not aware that Cher came from such an impoverished and dysfunctional background.

Got a kick out of this tidbit about her early childhood: "I was so obsessed with the idea that I was an angel sent to cure the disease (polio) that when Jonas Salk invented a vaccine, I was so pissed off" (33).