“from "Semele Recycled"But then your great voice rang out under the skiesmy name!-- and all those private namesfor the parts and places that had loved you best.And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung.The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar,and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment,and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles,and the runaway groom, and the fisherman's thirteen children,set up such a clamor, with their cries of "Miracle!"that our two bodies met like a thunderclapin midday-- right at the corner of that wretched fieldwith its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle.We fell in a heap on the compost heapand all our loving parts made love at once,while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyesand then went decently about their business.And here is is, moonlight again; we've bathed in the riverand are sweet and wholesome once more.We kneel side by side in the sand;we worship each other in whispers.But the inner parts remember fermenting hay,the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense,and passion, its bloody labor,its birth and rebirth and decay.”

“Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking,In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.[...]So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh,All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility!Meanwhile, have you used your mind today?”

“Food of LoveEating is touch carried to the bitter end. -Samuel Butler III'm going to murder you with love;I'm going to suffocate you with embraces;I'm going to hug you, bone by bone,Till you're dead all over.Then I will dine on your delectable marrow.You will become my personal Sahara;I'll sun myself in you, then with one swallowDrain you remaining brackish well.With my female blade I'll carve my nameIn your most aspiring palmBefore I chop it down.Then I'll inhale your last oasis whole.But in the total desert you becomeYou'll see me stretch, horizon to horizon,Opulent mirage!Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen.Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold.So you will summon each dry grain of sandAnd move towards me in undulating dunesTill you arrive at sudden ultramarine:A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores;Obstinate verdue, creeping inland, fast renudesYour barrens; succulents spring up everywhere,Surprising life! And I will be that green.When you are fed and watered, flourishingWith shoots entwining trellis, dome and spire,Till you are resurrected field in bloom,I will devour you, my natural food,My host, my final supper on the earth,And you'll begin to die again. ”

“You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.”

“Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem!”

“How can it be, I wondered, that we can be lying in bed next to a person we love wholly and helplessly, a person we love more than our own breath, and still ache to think of the one who caused us pain all those years ago? It's the betrayal of this second heart of ours, its flesh tied off like a fingertip twined tightly round with a single hair, blue-tinged from lack of blood. The shameful squeeze of it.”

“And sitting here now, with all of Lexy's dreams in my lap, I realize there are things about her I will never know. It's not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart its dark color; it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.”