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…

You hate the telephone but will not see me face to face so I am left beseeching you

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. .…

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…

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

This constant ache is my leg’s message to me. ‘Hello. Hello. Hello. You’re getting there,' it says, ‘step by step.’

Because you did, I too arrange fl… Watching the pistils just like ins… And the hard, red flesh of the pet… Widening beneath my eyes. They mo… Of clocks, seeming not to move exc…

I want to understand the steep thi… that climbs ladders in your throat… I can’t make sense of you. Everywhere I look you’re there— a vast landmark, a volcano

You whom I hoped to reach by writ… you beyond the multicolored tangle of telephone wires, you with your white paper soul trampled in transit,

You take me to the restaurant wher… plays God over a fish tank. The f… pace their green cage, waiting to… out of an element. Who knows what… There are thirteen in a tank meant

What makes a poet? Many have tried to guess. Is it a voice like a conduit, a plainspokenness to grief,

Parachuting down through clouds shaped like whales & sharks, dolphins & penguins, pelicans & gulls,

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

You call me courageous, I who grew up gnawing on books, as some kids