Praise our choices, sister, for each doorway open to us was taken by squads of fighting women who paid years of trouble and struggle, who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives that we might walk through these gates upright. Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out. Freedom is our real abundance.

The price of seeing is silence.

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.

Where I came from, the nights I had wandered and survived scared them, and where I would go they never imagined.

Love says, mine. Love says, I could eat you up. Love says, stay as you are, be my own private thing, don't you dare have ideas I don't share. Love has just got to gobble the other, bones and all, crunch. I don't want to do that. I sure don't want it done to me!

We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.

Obviously I find women more interesting than men to write about.