Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.

The older I get, the more I feel.

Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.

A family is a mystery.