“...you look at me like an emergency”

“Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.”

“ I used myself, let nothing use me. Like being on a private dole, sometimes more like cutting bricks in Egypt. What life there was, was mine, now and again to lay one hand on a warm brick and touch the sun's ghost with economical joy.”

“What rivets me to history is seeing / acts of survival turned / to rituals of self-hatred. This / is colonization. Unborn sisters, / look back on us in mercy where we failed ourselves, / see us not one-dimensional but with / the past as your steadying and corrective lens.”

“If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction a delta springing from the riverbed with its five fingers spread”

“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.”

“Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.”