My mouth blooms like a cut.

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.

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.

Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.

She suffers according to the digits of my hate. I hear the filaments of alabaster. I would lie down with them and lift my madness off like a wig. I would lie outside in a room of wool and let the snow cover me. Paris white or flake white or argentine, all in the washbasin of my mouth, calling “Oh.” I am empty. I am witless. Death is here. There is no other settlement.

... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.