No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.

...you look at me like an emergency

... people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen.

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'