Purple as tulips in May, mauve into lush velvet, purple as the stain blackberries leave on the lips, on the hands, the purple of ripe grapes sunlit and warm as flesh.

Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out.

Whatever is not an energy source, is an energy sink.

Memory in Greek mythology is the mother of the muses, and it is so for me. Both personal and societal memory move me strongly, and that is one of the sources of my writing.

Now that I am in my forties, she [my mother] tells me I'm beautiful; now that I am in my forties, she sends me presents and we have the long, personal and even remarkably honest phone calls I always wanted so intensely I forbade myself to imagine them. How strange. Perhaps Shaw was correct and if we lived to be several hundred years old, we would finally work it all out. I am deeply grateful. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

We lie in each other's arms eyes shut and fingers open and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.

I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don't write, not self-indulgent if I do.