The sanest thing in this world is love.
Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.
I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.
Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.
I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.
I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.
When I’m writing, I know I’m doing the thing I was born to do.
Somebody who should have been born is gone.
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.