“To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.”

“We have a double standard, which is to say, a man can show how much he cares by being violent – see, he’s jealous, he cares – a woman shows how much she cares by how much she’s willing to be hurt; by how much she will take; how much she will endure.”

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

“Der Ausdruck der Leute, die sich in Gemäldegalerien bewegen, zeigt eine schlecht verhehlte Enttäuschung darüber, dass dort nur Bilder hängen.”

“We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”

“To meet him, I go back to the Leningrad of 1964. The streets are devilishly cold: we sit on the pavement, he begins abruptly (a dry laugh, a cigarette) to tell me the story of his life, his words change to icicles as we speak. I read them in the air.”

Sometimes I think I’m never going to write a poem again and then there’s a full moon. I miss being in love but I miss myself most when I’m gone. In the salty wet air of my ancestry my auntie peels a mango with her teeth and I’m no longer writing political poems; because there are mangoes and my favorite memory is still alive. I’m digging for meaning but haunted by purpose and it’s an insufficient approach. What’s the margin of loss on words not spent today? I’m getting older. I’m buying smaller images to travel light. I wake up, I light up, I tidy, and it’s all over now.

“Well, if God doesn’t exist, who’s laughing at us?”

“Too many words, / but precious”

“There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning, God was everywhere and everything. A totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists. “So God just leaves?” No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering. Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. But the sparrow still falls.”

‘[…] das Versäumte geht um, gross wie die Schemen der Zukunft.’

‘Dein