I am the Sphinx. I am the woman buried in sand up to her chin. I am waiting for an archaeologist to unearth me,

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

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.

Chi vuol esser lieto, sia: di doman non c’e certezza. —Lorenzo di Medici In the poplars’ lengthening shadow… amid the rows of marigolds and ear…

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

The decorum of fire... —Pablo Neruda We learned the decorum of fire, the flame’s curious symmetry, the blue heat at the center of the…

the sky sinks its blue teeth into the mountains. Rising on pure will (the lurch & lift-off, the sudden swing

Black ship of night sailing through the world & the moon an orange slice tangy to the teeth of lovers who lie

I mourn a dead friend, like myself… —Pablo Neruda about César Vallej… I looked at the book. ‘It will stand,’ I thought. Not a palace

Broken ivories playing the blue piano of the sea. We have come

Next birthday I am thirty-six, & formed (for all intents & purposes) in tooth & claw.

Mute marriages: the ten-ton block of ice obstructing the throat, the heart, the red filter of the liver, the clogged life.

I sit in the black leather chair meditating on the plume of smoke that rises in the air, riffling the pages of my life

It used to be hard for women, snowed in their white lives, white lies, to write books