“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.”

“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.”

“That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.”

“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.”

“You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake, ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs window. (from "Antilamentation")”

“And I saw it didn’t matterwho had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.The black oily asphalt, the slick beautyof the Iranian attendant, the thickeningclouds—nothing was mine. And I understoodfinally, after a semester of philosophy,a thousand books of poetry, after deathand childbirth and the startled cries of menwho called out my name as they entered me,I finally believed I was alone, felt itin my actual, visceral heart, heard it echolike a thin bell.”

“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.”