Fee-fi-fo-fum - Now I'm borrowed. Now I'm numb.

Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.

The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.

The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.

Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.

And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself

...became a woman who learned her own skin and dug into her soul and found it full.