“It is still news to her that passioncould steer her wrongthough she went down, a thousand timesstrung outacross railroad tracks, off bridgesunder cars, or stiffglass bottle still in hand, hair softon greasy pillows, still it isnews she cannot follow love (hisburning footsteps in blue crystalsnow) & stillcome out all right.”

“Yukiko steered the subject away from sex as fast as she could. She was still occasionally woken by nightmares about the day her father had tried to sit her down for "the talk".”

“Laura decided to send a cable to Lady Honoria after all, on the chance that she might still reach her in Baden-Baden. But while she was planning what to say, she felt, all of a sudden, the room start to spin about her, dizzying her, so that she fell back across the bed and across the pillows wondering what was happening to her until everything went as pitch-black as night and she sank down and down and down into a dark, endless tunnel.”

“I loved to take her hair down and she sat on the bed and kept very still, except suddenly she would dip down to kiss me while I was doing it, and I would take out the pins and lay them on the sheet and it would be loose and I would watch her while she kept very still and then take out the last two pins and it would all come down and she would drop her head and we would both be inside of it, and it was the feeling of inside a tent or behind a falls.”

“My grandmother is over eightyand she still doesn’t need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.”

“Footsteps shuffled on the stair/Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair/Spread out in fiery points/Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.”