Quotes from Charlie Smith

it is not news that we live in a world Where beauty is unexplainable And suddenly ruined And has its own routines. We are often far From home in a dark town, and our griefs Are difficult to translate into a language Understood by others.

I love the distant glow in the nighttime desert sky like a worn yellow spot in the dark everything might still slip through — Charlie Smith, from section 1 "Outside Las Vegas" of "Late Days," Jump Soul: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2014)