A woman who writes feels too much.
In a dream you are never eighty.
The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.
The joy that isn’t shared dies young.
One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.
You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.
The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.
Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.
Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.
Now I am going back And I have ripped my hand From your hand as I said I would And I have made it this far...
Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.
I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.
Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind.
Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know – no matter what they call it.
The snow has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me.