“Power Living in the earth-deposits of our historyToday a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earthone bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-oldcure for fever or melancholy a tonicfor living on this earth in the winters of this climate.Today I was reading about Marie Curie:she must have known she suffered from radiation sicknessher body bombarded for years by the elementshe had purifiedIt seems she denied to the endthe source of the cataracts on her eyesthe cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-endstill she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencilShe died a famous woman denyingher woundsdenyingher wounds came from the same source as her power. ”

“A thinking woman sleeps with monstersthat beak which grips her, she becomes.”

“When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”

“Flags are blossoming now where little else is blossomingand I am bent on fathoming what it means to love my country. The history of this earth and the bones within it?Minerals, traces, rumors I am made from, morsel, minuscule fibre, one womanlike and unlike so many, fooled as to her destiny, the scope of her task?One citizen like and unlike so many, touched and untouched in passing…A patriot is not a weapon. A patriot us one who wrestles for the soul of her countryas she wrestles for her own being, for the soul of his country…”

“A lot is being said today about the influence that the myths and images of women have on all of us who are products of culture. I think it has been a peculiar confusion to the girl or woman who tries to write because she is peculiarly susceptible to language. She goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she too has been putting words and images together; she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over in the ‘words’ masculine persuasive force’ of literature she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men.”

“PLANETARIUMThinking of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848)astronomer, sister of William; and others.A woman in the shape of a monstera monster in the shape of a womanthe skies are full of thema woman ‘in the snowamong the Clocks and instrumentsor measuring the ground with poles’in her 98 years to discover8 cometsshe whom the moon ruledlike uslevitating into the night skyriding the polished lensesGalaxies of women, theredoing penance for impetuousnessribs chilledin those spaces of the mindAn eye, ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’ from the mad webs of Uranusborg encountering the NOVAevery impulse of light explodingfrom the coreas life flies out of us Tycho whispering at last ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’What we see, we seeand seeing is changingthe light that shrivels a mountainand leaves a man aliveHeartbeat of the pulsarheart sweating through my bodyThe radio impulsepouring in from Taurus I am bombarded yet I standI have been standing all my life in thedirect path of a battery of signalsthe most accurately transmitted mostuntranslatable language in the universeI am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-luted that a light wave could take 15years to travel through me And hastaken I am an instrument in the shapeof a woman trying to translate pulsationsinto images for the relief of the bodyand the reconstruction of the mind.”

“I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch”