Weddings happen once. That's the point. They're a bluster of confetti and hope all wrapped up in sticky wedding cake and four-year-old girls in big dresses with massive bows.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.

Some of the reasons John McCain lost in 2008 were his lackluster campaign, his refusal to showcase Obama's extreme liberalism and, thus, his failure to demonstrate why he would make a better president than Obama.

The new industries are brainy industries and so-called knowledge workers tend to like to be near other people who are the same. Think of the City of Hollywood. People cluster. This means you have winning regions, such as London and Cambridge, and losing regions. The people who want to be top lawyers in Sunderland are hoovered up by London.

The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.

The plainer the dress, the greater luster does beauty appear.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Then, on a blustery evening in October 2017, the worst wildfires in modern state history ignited. They ripped across Northern California, pushed by the Diablo Winds. The infernos killed 44 people and hospitalized another 192. They incinerated fabled vineyards and the working-class Santa Rosa neighborhood of Coffey Park. People died in swimming pools, in mobile home parks, in their bedrooms and their cars. A fourteen-year-old perished at the end of his family's driveway, unable to outrun the flames. PG&E was held responsible for seventeen of the twenty-one wildfires-which burned an area eight times the size of San Francisco-though the company escaped blame for the worst of the bunch.

The mind-the culture-has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.

We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.

I am in this same river. I can't much help it. I admit it: I'm racist. The other night I saw a group (or maybe a pack?) or white teenagers standing in a vacant lot, clustered around a 4x4, and I crossed the street to avoid them; had they been black, I probably would have taken another street entirely. And I'm misogynistic. I admit that, too. I'm a shitty cook, and a worse house cleaner, probably in great measure because I've internalized the notion that these are woman's work. Of course, I never admit that's why I don't do them: I always say I just don't much enjoy those activities (which is true enough; and it's true enough also that many women don't enjoy them either), and in any case, I've got better things to do, like write books and teach classes where I feel morally superior to pimps. And naturally I value money over life. Why else would I own a computer with a hard drive put together in Thailand by women dying of job-induced cancer? Why else would I own shirts mad in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, and shoes put together in Mexico? The truth is that, although many of my best friends are people of color (as the cliche goes), and other of my best friends are women, I am part of this river: I benefit from the exploitation of others, and I do not much want to sacrifice this privilege. I am, after all, civilized, and have gained a taste for "comforts and elegancies" which can be gained only through the coercion of slavery. The truth is that like most others who benefit from this deep and broad river, I would probably rather die (and maybe even kill, or better, have someone kill for me) than trade places with the men, women, and children who made my computer, my shirt, my shoes.

Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules - and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

The new industries are brainy industries and so-called knowledge workers tend to like to be near other people who are the same. Think of the City of Hollywood. People cluster. This means you have winning regions such as London and Cambridge and losing regions. The people who want to be top lawyers in Sunderland are hoovered up by London.

Knowledge may give weight but accomplishments give luster and many more people see than weigh.

When I was at college I worked in a department store called Brit Home Stores which is a pretty lackluster department store selling clothes for middle-aged women. My job was to walk the floor and find anything that was damaged take it to the store room and log it.

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

Some of the reasons John McCain lost in 2008 were his lackluster campaign his refusal to showcase Obama's extreme liberalism and thus his failure to demonstrate why he would make a better president than Obama.

The plainer the dress the greater luster does beauty appear.

The work of art just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness the rigidity the regularity the luster on every interior and exterior facet of the crystal.

As in nature as in art so in grace it is rough treatment that gives souls as well as stones their luster.