A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.

In those years, people will say, we lost trackof the meaning of we, of youwe found ourselvesreduced to Iand the whole thing becamesilly, ironic, terrible:we were trying to live a personal lifeand yes, that was the only lifewe could bear witness to But the great dark birds of history screamed and plungedinto our personal weatherThey were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drovealong the shore, through the rags of fogwhere we stood, saying I

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,our animal passion rooted in the city.

[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,and somehow, each of us will help the other live,and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

When the ideas or forms we need are banished, we seek their residues wherever we can trace them

The faithful drudging child the child at the oak desk whose penmanship,hard work, style will win her prizesbecomes the woman with a mission, not to win prizes but to change the laws of history.

...you look at me like an emergency

I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from "Splittings