“Saw you walking barefoottaking a long lookat the new moon's eyelidlater spreadsleep-fallen, naked in your dark hairasleep but not obliviousof the unslept unsleepingelsewhereTonight I thinkno poetrywill serveSyntax of rendition:verb pilots the planeadverb modifies actionverb force-feeds nounsubmerges the subjectnoun is chokingverb disgraced goes on doingnow diagram the sentence”

“Wherever in this city, screens flickerwith pornography, with science-fiction vampires,victimized hirelings bending to the lash,we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walkthrough the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid crueltiesof our own neighborhoods.We need to grasp our lives inseperablefrom those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,and the red begonia perilously flashingfrom a tenement sill six stories high,or the long-legged young girls playing ballin the junior highschool playground.No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,our animal passion rooted in the city.”

“Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people. This is true in political situations. The quality and depth of the politics evolving from a group depends in large part on their understanding of honor. Much of what is narrowly termed "politics" seems to rest on a longing for certainty even at the cost of honesty, for an analysis which, once given, need not be re-examined…It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.”

“FINAL NOTATIONSit will not be simple, it will not be longit will take little time, it will take all your thoughtit will take all your heart, it will take all your breathit will be short, it will not be simpleit will touch you through your ribs, it will take all your heartit will not be long, it will occupy your thoughtas a city is occupied, as a bed is occupiedit will take all your flesh, it will not be simpleyou are coming into us who cannot withstand youyou are coming into us who never wanted to withstand youyou are taking parts of us into places never plannedyou are going far away with pieces of our livesit will be short, it will take all your breathit will not be simple, it will become your will”

“Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelledand other known and unknown there, long sweet summer eveningon the tarred roof:leaned back your head to the nightvault swarming with starsthe Pleiades broken loose, not seven but thousandsevery known constellation flinging out fiery threadsand you could distinguish all-cobwebs, tendrils, anatomies of starscoherently hammocked, blueblack avenues between…It was New York, the dream-sitethe lost city the city of dreadful light…wewent striding the avenues in our fiery hairin our bodies young and ordinary riding the subways readingor pressed against other bodiesfeeling in them the maps of Brooklyn Queens Manhattan…”

“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.”

“I don’t want to know wreckage, dreck, and waste, but these are the materialsand so are the slow lift of the moon’s belly.over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling inanother season, light and music still pouring over our fissured, cracked terrain. If you had known meonce you’d still know me though in a differentlight and life. This is no place you ever knew me.But it would not surprise youto find me here, walking in fog, the sweep of the great oceaneluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as alwaysI fix on the land. I am stuck to earth…these are not the roadsyou knew me by. But the woman driving, walking, watchingfor life and death, is the same.”