I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.
A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.
A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.
Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.
Nine-tenths of human law is about possession.
I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.
Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.
The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?
Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.
If it’s important, your heart remembers.
All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper.
I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.
Everything truly important is washable.
There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.