#AmericanWriters
I am not interested in my body– the part that stinks & rots & brings forth life,
There is only one story: he loved her, then stopped loving her, while she did not stop loving him.
The whole world is flat & I am round. Even women avert their eyes, & men, embarrassed by the messy way
She left him in death’s egg, the bone sack & the gunny sack… the bag of down & feathers-all… Somehow he couldn’t get back. It was night,
Handcuffed by time, I travel across this broad beautiful America– mesas, deserts, peaks with clouds caught
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
At dusk Demeter becomes afraid for baby Persephone lost in that hell which she herself created
Living in a house near the Black Forest, without any clocks, she’s begun to listen to the walls.
If you ask him he will talk for ho… how at fourteen he hammered signs,… raw with cold, and later painted b… in ladies’ boudoirs; how he played… for two weeks in jail, and lived o…
Because I am here anchoring you to the passionate darkness, you gaze out the window at the light.
I began by loving women & the love turned to bitterness. My mother, the bitter, whose bitter lesson–
I had pegged you as protégé, adoptee, someone I could save. The last thing I needed
Parachuting down through clouds shaped like whales & sharks, dolphins & penguins, pelicans & gulls,
My love is too much– it embarrasses you– blood, poems, babies, red needs that telephone from foreign countries,
When I am an old lady the young men will come to me & sit trembling at my trembling