Women have waited millions of years, growing separate as another species, with visions and priorities no man-words, no man-measurements can comprehend.

As a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse.

They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?

Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.

I know California isn't a real destination. You can't get there from New Jersey, not simply by following a line drawn on a map. The process of arrival is more subtle and complex. It involves acts of contrition. You must appease the gods. You must find novel forms of penance. You must tattoo your children and look at the wonder. It's about conjuring and awakening and intuitions you wish you never had.

Like I'm dragging bundles of old clothes? I'm carrying artifacts that breathe fire. I'm talking about a language of smoke. These are three-dimensional creatures that can mate. I'd no more leave them go by the side of the trail than I would my child. I'll carry them until someone amputates my arms.

I write a lot by sound. One sound leads me to another. These sounds aren't random; they have their own logic.