Any Good Poem

"He's dying on dialysis—I’ve known him since my first days as a doctor, and now he wants to quit."

"For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world..."

"Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision. Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up. Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours, my doctor, day and night."

"...my eyes searching for the one skater in every crowd who glides graceful as a god, like my father years ago in his black leather racing skates..."

"My black cat sprints through the kitchen door, a glassy-eyed cottontail hanging limp from his jaws."

"Walk through the garden's dormant splendor. Say only, thank you."

"You will love again the stranger who was your self."

"Hat factories closed quiet as prayer books, and loss lingered in my father’s guts like unswept garbage after a big parade..."

"Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite."

"Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, Or English poets who grew up on Greek (I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek)."

"His wing Scythes down another day, his motion Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear The crashless fall of stalks of Time."

"The sounds of the world at this late hour sadden you, but then enters the rain, hastening down, the rain that wants to touch everything and almost does."

"My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams..."

"Oh for a stronger magic, that I could wave my arms and reach deep inside my white coat pocket, the mass vanished..."

"And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough..."

"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."