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

Experience is always larger than language.

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap, the coffee, the rice, to iron the pants, to braid the hair, to pull the day's water up from the well, to boil water for tea, to wash the children for school, to pull the vegetables and start the walk to market, to run to catch the bus for the work that is paid. I don't know when most women sleep.

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

Any woman's death diminishes me.

... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.