“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…”

“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.”

“Origins and History of ConsciousnessIII.It’s simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,dress, go out, drink coffee,enter a life again. It isn’t simpleto wake from sleep into the neighborhoodof one neither strange nor familiarwhom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselvesdownward hand over hand as on a rope that quiveredover the unsearched…. We did this. Conceivedof each other, conceived each other in a darknesswhich I remember as drenched in light. I want to call this, life.But I can’t call it life until we start to movebeyond this secret circle of firewhere our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wallwhere the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleepslike a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.”

“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”

“Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.”

“A language is a map of our failures”

“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.”