Bless all useful objects, the spoons made of bone, the mattress I cook my dreams upon, the typewriter that is my church with an altar of keys always ….

There is hope. There is hope everywhere. Today God give milk and I have the pail..

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 o….

God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer..

The sanest thing in this world is love..

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourse….

Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fin….

I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost co….

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..

I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair..

They [daisies] are my favorite flower. There is something innocent and vulnerable about them as if they thanked you for admiring them..

We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!.

Blue eyes wash off sometimes..

I remember the stink of the liverwurst. How I was put on a platter and laid between the mayonnaise and the bacon. The rhythm of the refrigerator had ….

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, h….

The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not..

Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane..

Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone..

O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning..

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 danc….

I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not..