Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.

I'm sarcastic, skeptical, and sometimes callous because I'm still afraid, deep down, of letting myself be hurt.

If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You’ll halt the clock That syncopates our love.

The reason I haven't been writing in this book for so long is partly that I haven't had one decent coherent thought to put down.

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ

This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.