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The first time I met you I fought your father in the driveway.

‘Isn’t this great?’ she said. ‘A bit of peace for ourselves?’ ‘No one could go into a cafe on their own on Christmas Day.’

There was a glint of cold red light out there, on the other shore of the lake.

This must be what it’s like to be seen by God as we inch toward the infinite.

I do not want to fall prey to the bewitchment of my mind by language.

I believed in department stores the way I believed in Germany.

I commute to war five days a week in a station wagon the color of an egg.

She gives her daughter her birth certificate and oil money: Go.

We couldn’t tell which of us was a girl or a boy we gorged on dirt.

It was the sixties, and I was in
college and incredibly restless.

If a friend’s family is persecuted, call Sinn Fein on that number.

She has wings of rouge on her cheekbones, her beak blood red.

He sees the slight swelling of her breasts in the open collar of her blouse.

The night was clear, a fat kingfish moon in the sky with stars.

Find a hair in the rose bush, wrap it around a thorn until that thorn is soft.

Three fingers had been cut from her right hand, two from her left.

Too bad there is no oil between her legs that 4-year-old Muslim girl.

Be glad the numbness in your legs isn’t reading on your face.

Death is a home unseen by the side of the road, the rifle barrel aimed.

I saw my mother’s face turn dark like the winter sky before a storm.

When I see buffaloes run I think of love—how it is held.

Someone was saying his name, and that’s how he knew he was dead.

I had never thought of bed before as anything but an innocent place.

The notebooks reveal insertions, deletions, queries, and corrections.

I returned to Vietnam with a tape recorder to collect ca dao.

No one tells you what it sounds like out in the streets when bullets clang.

Papa’s link to that pond was a matter of blood. And the delicious carp.