Regret is the young girl who sits… & stares at her hands. They are bluer than shadows in sno… They are bloodless as fear. Her fingernail moons are white.

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

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

Goddess, I come to you my neck wreathed with rosebuds, my head filled with visions of inf… my palms open to your silver nails… my eyes open to your rays of illum…

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

She leaps into the alien heart of the passerby, the drunk, the girl who spouts Freudian talk over Szechuan food. She is part herself,

‘Why do you have stripes in your forehead, Mama? Are you

Love, death, sleeping with somebody else’s husband or wife-this is what poetry is about-Eskimo, Aztec,

Sometimes the poem doesn’t want to come; it hides from the poet like a playful cat who has run

After the first astounding rush, after the weeks at the lake, the crystal, the clouds, the water… the snow breaking under our boots… & the long mornings in bed. .…

This is the long tunnel of wanting… Its walls are lined with remembere… wet & red as the inside of you… full & juicy as your probing t… warm as your belly against mine,

‘Hotel rooms constitute a separate… —Tom Stoppard A bed, a telephone, the cord to the world beyond the womb . . .

In the redwood house sailing off into the ocean, I sleep with you– our dreams mingling, our breath coming & going

She was not a slender woman, but her skin was milk mixed in with strawberry jam & between her legs the word pu… & her hair was the color of wh…

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,