Dear Colette, I want to write to you about being a woman for that is what you write to me. I want to tell you how your face

If God is a dog drowsing, contemplating the quintessential dogginess of the universe, of the whole canine race, why are we

On the first night of the full moon, the primeval sack of ocean broke, & I gave birth to you

We used to strike sparks off each other. Our eyes would meet or our hands, & the blue lightning of love

. .Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when… and tangled in a woman’s body? —Virginia Woolf Every month,

Because my grandmother’s hours were apple cakes baking, & dust motes gathering, & linens yellowing & seams and hems

The poet fears failure & so she says “Hold on pen— what if the critics hate me?”

He still wears the glass skin of c… Under his hands, the stones turn m… His eyes are knives. Who froze the ground to his feet? Who locked his mouth into an horiz…

The man under the bed The man who has been there for yea… The man who waits for my floating… The man who is silent as dustballs… The man whose breath is the breath…

Bobbing in the waters of the womb, little godhead, ten toes, ten fing… & infinite hope, sails upside down through the worl… My bones, I know, are only a cage

A man so sick that the sexual soup cannot save him - the chicken soup of sex which cures everything: tossed mane of noodles,

I try to keep falling in love if only to keep death at bay.

My broom with its tufts of roses beckoning at the black, with its crown of thistles, prickling the sky,