One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is “Whatever you do, don’t be boring.”
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.
Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.
To love another is somethinglike prayer and it can’t be planned, you just fallinto its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
God is only mocked by believers.
I think it will be a miracle if I don’t someday end up killing myself.
I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger.
It’s a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.
Poetry to me is prayer...
Letters are false really – they are expressions of the way you wish you were instead of the way you are...