Rob Baker’s Reviews > The Asking: New and Selected Poems > Status Update

"Leave anyone too long alone with his own thoughts, and every possibility will be not only explored, but poked and prodded until it raises its shaggy head, settles its lidless eyes on you. Such is the price of isolation, and that mulling that never ceases" (24).

"As the thoughts of a person
in age sometimes grow sparer,
like a great cleanness come into a room,
the soul may grow sparer,
one sparrow song carves it completely.
And still the room is full,
and still the heart" (112).

"So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it"

(from "The Weighing", 93)

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