I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Too much self-regard has never struck me as dignified: trying to twist over my shoulder to view my own behind.

The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love like oxygen or she turns blue choking. A strong woman is a woman who loves strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong in words, in action, in connection, in feeling; she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry, a yam of a woman of butter and brass.

Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.

The moon is always female and so am I although often in the vale of razorblades I have wished I could put on and take off my sex like a dress and why not?