“The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.”

“our limbs which had already traveled far beyond her world, carrying the click of distances in the smooth, untroubled soles of their shoes.”

“For you who came so far; for you who held out, wearing a black scarf to signify grief; for you who believe true love can find you amidst this atlas of tears linking one town to its own memory of mortar, when it was still a dream to be built and people moved there, believing, and someone with sky and birds in his heart said this would be a good place for a park.”

“Why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name.”

“what twists or rage greater than we could ever guess had savaged skylines, thousands of lives?”

“Making a FistFor the first time, on the road north of Tampico,I felt the life sliding out of me,a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.I was seven, I lay in the carwatching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin."How do you know if you are going to die?"I begged my mother.We had been traveling for days.With strange confidence she answered,"When you can no longer make a fist."Years later I smile to think of that journey,the borders we must cross separately,stamped with our unanswerable woes.I who did not die, who am still living,still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,clenching and opening one small hand.”

“To know the difference,you must run this mountain without pause. In the evening or the afternoon, you must cross the first fields wakingto your footsteps, stormwashed at the foothills.In the evening or the afternoon, in the closing of a shadowline, you must read aloud the reddened last words of this canyon's leaves to the trees that clap their hands.”