One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is "Whatever you do, don't be boring."

As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

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.

Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind

For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.

Now I am just an elderly lady who is full of spleen, who humps around greater Boston in a God-awful hat, who never lived and yet outlived her time, hating men and dogs and Democrats.