“If trees could speak they wouldn't”

“And oh, the oh my nape of the neck. The up-swept oh my nape of the neck. I could walk behind anyone and fall in love. Don’t stop. Don’t turn around.”

“Moon In the WindowI wish I could say I was the kind of childwho watched the moon from her window,would turn toward it and wonder.I never wondered. I read. Dark signsthat crawled toward the edge of the page.It took me years to grow a heartfrom paper and glue. All I had was a flashlight, bright as the moon,a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.”

“How not to imagine the tumorsripening beneath his skin, fleshI have kissed, stroked with my fingertips,pressed my belly and breasts against, some nightsso hard I thought I could enter him, openhis back at the spine like a door or a curtainand slip in like a small fish between his ribs,nudge the coral of his brains with my lips,brushing over the blue coil of his bowelswith the fluted silk of my tail.”

“Death comes to me again, a girlin a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.It’s not so terrible she tells me,not like you think, all darknessand silence. There are windchimesand the smell of lemons, some daysit rains, but more often the air is dryand sweet. I sit beneath the staircasebuilt from hair and bone and listento the voices of the living. I like it,she says, shaking the dust from her hair,especially when they fight, and when they sing.”

“Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.”

“Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others--not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art.”