“And tonight our skin, our bones,that have survived our fathers,will meet, delicate in the hold,fastened together in an intricate lock.Then one of us will shout,"My need is more desperate!" andI will eat you slowly with kisseseven though the killer in youhas gotten out.”

“You, Doctor Martin, walkfrom breakfast to madness. Late August,I speed through the antiseptic tunnelwhere the moving dead still talkof pushing their bones against the thrustof cure. And I am queen of this summer hotelor the laughing bee on a stalkof death. We stand in brokenlines and wait while they unlockthe doors and count us at the frozen gatesof dinner. The shibboleth is spokenand we move to gravy in our smockof smiles. We chew in rows, our platesscratch and whine like chalkin school. There are no knivesfor cutting your throat. I makemoccasins all morning. At first my handskept empty, unraveled for the livesthey used to work. Now I learn to takethem back, each angry finger that demandsI mend what another will breaktomorrow. Of course, I love you;you lean above the plastic sky,god of our block, prince of all the foxes.The breaking crowns are newthat Jack wore. Your third eyemoves among us and lights the separate boxeswhere we sleep or cry.What large children we arehere. All over I grow most tallin the best ward. Your business is people,you call at the madhouse, an oraculareye in our nest. Out in the hallthe intercom pages you. You twist in the pullof the foxy children who falllike floods of life in frost.And we are magic talking to itself,noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sinsforgotten. Am I still lost?Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,counting this row and that row of moccasinswaiting on the silent shelf.”

“Wanting to Die Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.Then the almost unnameable lust returns.Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention,the furniture you have placed under the sun.But suicides have a special language.Like carpenters they want to know which tools.They never ask why build.Twice I have so simply declared myself,have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,have taken on his craft, his magic.In this way, heavy and thoughtful,warmer than oil or water,I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.I did not think of my body at needle point.Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.Suicides have already betrayed the body.Still-born, they don't always die,but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweetthat even children would look on and smile.To thrust all that life under your tongue!—that, all by itself, becomes a passion.Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,and yet she waits for me, year after year,to so delicately undo an old wound,to empty my breath from its bad prison.Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,leaving the page of the book carelessly open,something unsaid, the phone off the hookand the love, whatever it was, an infection.”

“The summer has seized you,as when, last month in Amalfi, I sawlemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too,the market stalls of mushroomsand garlic bugs all engorged.Or I even think of the orchard next door,where the berries are doneand the apples are beginning to swell.And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beanswe couldn’t eat.”

“Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.”

“I lay there silently,hoarding my small dignity.I did not ask about the gate or the closet.I did not question the bedtime ritualwhere, on the cold bathroom tiles,I was spread out dailyand examined for flaws.I did not knowthat my bones,those solids, those pieces of sculpturewould not splinter.”

“The Witch's Life"When I was a childthere was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch.All day she peered from her second storywindowfrom behind the wrinkled curtainsand sometimes she would open the windowand yell: Get out of my life!She had hair like kelpand a voice like a boulder.I think of her sometimes nowand wonder if I am becoming her.”