I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.
Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.
I’m the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.
True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.
In an old time there was a king as wise as a dictionary.
No one to hate except the slim fish of memory that slides in and out of my brain.
I would like to bury all the hating eyes under the sand somewhere...
It is in the small things we see it. The child’s first step, as awesome as an earthquake. The first time you rode a bike, wallowing up the sidewalk.
No matter whose bed you die in the bed will be yours for your voyage onto the surgical andiron of God.
My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire, as doth the spider hang her baby on a thin web.
Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber’s tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse...
All the oxygen of the world was in them. All the feet of the babies of the world were in them. All the crotches of the angels of the world were in them. All the morning kisses of Philadelphia were in them.
Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never arguing over the timing of an egg, never telling the same story twice...
I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs...
Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I’d say, I am rowing, I am rowing...
Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.
Mood can be as important as sense.
Poems aren’t postcards to send home.
I wonder if the artist ever lives his life – he is so busy recreating it.
To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can’t be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.