“I wonder what freezesthe flurry of hurt on her cold-flushed cheeks, if his touch isa salve or the shattering.”

“do you dare to step in-to the vulnerable black, stripped to the soul with human blindness – when the full and weeping moon steps from the shade of a tumult of mountains – when, in the fragrant dim, day's tree stump transformsinto some nether-worldly other – when time's skin is thin and you arebared – when there is nothing between you and the Wildest Onewhose name is your own?”

“what is poetry if not seeing and feeling, and feeling, feelings running deepand okay – do I see, notice the gray pigeon feathers that heave by on drafts of passing cars reeking, leaking gasoline fumesand okay – do I feel?”

“we have forgotten what night tastes like, salted by full moon silver rupturingthe dark. we have forgotten how the skin sings when the lunar fervor unfurls across its follicles.”

“I am at the gates of my own destruction.(Or so I'm told.)”

“God,is there no faith left?He has not told. I would not know Him if I saw Him.”

“absencelooks like a lake bed flooded with skysounds like cotton howlingtastes like tear-stained pillowssmells like churning bile and burnt hairfeels like screaming agony, my heart dying and dying”

“I wonder what freezesthe flurry of hurt on her cold-flushed cheeks, if his touch isa salve or the shattering.”

“I hear talk of that slippery slope, and my heart catches for a beat. But there is the musky truth I'm standing in that I can't deny, and it tastes of so much holy. That old way, the narrow line, I see now that was a slippery, saccharine surface where my soul could gain no purchase. For the first time, my feet feel sure beneath me, and that sense is twining its way up from my ankles, racing toward my knees, my thighs, my secret places, my heart. It's in my blood now, and I can't deny it. I can't deny it. I open my eyes, because I could see even through my clutched-closed lids that the darkness is light, that the blindness has given way to searing vision. I can't deny it.”

“now I'm blinking in a new gloamingand all I see as I'm stretched low down hereis a world of women flat on their frozenfaces. we are the ground itself, corporealcarpet of cells, softness calloused hardbeneath the pebbled soles of the fathersand husbands and brothers and priestsand it's a horror if you could see it,a world of women ruinedby man's fear.”

“the mind is a treasuretrove, an almanac, a tomb.”