Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.

Some women marry houses.

A woman like that is misunderstood.I have been her kind.

A woman who writes feels too much, Those trances and portents!

We are America.We are the coffin fillers.We are the grocers of death.We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.The bomb opens like a shoebox.And the child?The child is certainly not yawning.And the woman?The woman is bathing her heart.It has been torn out of herand as a last actshe is rinsing it off in the river.This is the death market.America,where are your credentials?

We were fair game but we have kept out of the cesspool. We are strong. We are the good ones. Do not discover us for we lie together all in green like pond weeds. Hold me, my young dear, hold me.

Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.

Say, I am the air I break; or say,I am a spool unwinding.

No. Not really red,but the color of a rose when it bleeds.