Any Good Poem

"What luck—an open bookstore up ahead..."

"Tornado or torbellino or something else, I ask her about the valley’s strange wind. And she laughs, says that she was calling to ask me the same thing."

"As if this big dangerous animal is also a part of me, that somewhere inside the delicate skin of my body, there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood."

"Eyes locked on the flat-lined monitor, she hears the last drop gurgle, the team quiet and calm in a lake of blood."

"...he put gently into the earth some plants which, most likely, some of them, in all likelihood, continue to grow..."

"Too often summer days appear, Emblems of perfect happiness, I can't confront..."

"By the first of August, the invisible beetles began to snore and the grass was as tough as hemp and was no color..."

"...everything known and unknown for longer than I have searched or breathed, the infinity of my ignorance."

"The dark pours down, sticky as Coke, but the light from the kitchen gleams like a beacon."

"So many things look absurd from a distance that people still take seriously..."

"At O'Hare, at Atlanta, at Dallas/Fort Worth, it happens every trip, at LaGuardia, Logan, and Washington Dulles, the customary strip..."

"She was clear-eyed and dying when I knew her, soft breaths feathering from her chest like distant smoke..."

"The Child is father of the Man..."

"It is not a place out there but a place in here. I catch on its barbed wire in both places."

"But you who know all will never comprehend our resentment of perfection, the flawlessness you take for granted..."

"...this memory held on chest, in hand..."

"Scores of textbooks later we’re a pair of pagers and missed dinners, companions in sleep-deprived nights."

"I am not comforted by the morning after the night."

"Nothing is so beautiful as Spring..."

"Everyone thinks the brain is so complicated, but let’s look at the facts."

"We lower a plastic tray on his ribs as if food can stop the dying..."

"I had no expectation though of actually catching a fish when somehow we did."

"Migrants pay for safety. We pay people to believe that what we tell them is true, especially when we have spared them the hardest facts to hold."

"Each spring, when earth warms and begs me to open its dark skin, I carry them past flowering apples and pears to the quiet square of garden..."

Is your card the king of rats? Is your card the queen of roaches?

"I hold a thousand kites in a field loosed from their tethers at once..."

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals..."

"Under the bludgeonings of chance, My head is bloody, but unbowed."

"I remember perfumes and anxious sweat, who preferred the big leather chair and who liked to hide in the sofa’s corner."

"This isn’t as easy as it seems..."