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…

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

Male? Female? God doesn’t care about sex & the long tree-shaded avenue

A bespectacled artist called Lear First perfected this smile in a sn… He was clever and witty; He gave life to this ditty - That original author called Lear.

Endless duplication of lives and o… —Theodore Roethke I have known the imperial power of… the awesome indifference of recept… I have been intimidated by desk &a…

I began by loving women & the love turned to bitterness. My mother, the bitter, whose bitter lesson–

Looking for a place where we might turn off the inner dialogue, the monologue of futures & regrets,

The old poet with his face full of lines, with iambs jumping in his hair lik… with all the revisions of his body unsaying him,

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

You sleep in the darkness, you with the back I love & the gift of sleeping through my noisy nights of poetry. I have taken other men into my tho…

In Autumn, as in Spring, the sap flows, the sap wishes to race against heartbeats

For Naomi Lazard Sometimes I can’t wait until I… —Naomi Lazard My friends are tired. The ones who are married are tired