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My soul’s parts know little and don’t care whether I live or die.

When you turn fifty, you have to prove to yourself you’ve got something left.

Language seems accomplice to grieving, everything dissolves.

A letter is like a poem, showing the marks of an unwilling composer.

He was shirtless and showcasing a large tattoo of the Twin Towers.

Before sunrise I counted nine meteors scratching the heavens.

The blackness of her hair seemed to pull the color from her body.

I became a symbol of freedom, a miracle who had escaped the Devil.

Sundays, your wife at Mass, we locked ourselves in my room.

The small, inadequate marks follow the outline, things left behind.

How High Is the Moon? Too high to be touched, too high to be felt.

Louise Farmer Smith

Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.

The heron returns; the sky veils her stars; then bares them.

Mild nights would have us out of doors—at their opening I am rapt.

Salve, salve, Regina. As the song ends, he folds into the fabric seat.

Sometimes you weren’t a good daughter, the mother says.

She’s coming back, her arms full of the flowers I gave her once a year.

The dead men don’t look like themselves or anybody else.

The truth has always been thus and the response the same.

It’s a girls’ college we’re going to, but all the guys know Polly’s name.

How bright and eager they appear, how ready to get started.

Elinor had loved a man. The journey’s purpose was that she might forget.

It doesn’t matter who he is. I don’t think about him much anymore.

We know of friends and relatives who have passed away, young and old.

through the trees, breathless, the grouse leads us steady as a rope.

Heaven preserve me from the Epidemic of a Proud Ignorance!

I believe you get to see a sunset once. Death, well, I’ve lost count.

Dining at Bocuse wasn’t about food, but about pleasure in all its forms.

The future of the book began to appear among imaginary woods.