"First Psalm"

• Let there be seasons so that we may put on 12 coats & shovel snow or take off our skins & bathe in the Caribbean.
• Let there be seasons so that our tongues will be rich in asparagus & limes.

"Fourth Psalm"

• For I am an orphan with two death masks on the mantel & came from the grave of my mama's belly into the commerce of Boston.
• For I became a we & this imaginary we became a kind company when the big balloons did not bend over us.
• For I could not read or speak & on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.
• For I lay as pale as flour & drank moon juice from a rubber tip.
• For I spoke not but the magician played me tricks of the blood.
• For I cried then & my little box wiggled with melancholy.
• For the room itself was a box. Four thick walls of roses. A ceiling Christopher found low & menacing.
• For I smiled & there was no one to notice. Christopher was asleep. He was making a sea sound.
• For I wiggled my fingers but they would not stay. I could not put them in place. They broke out of my mouth.
• For I was prodding myself out of my sleep, out the green room. The sleep of the desperate who travel backwards into darkness.
• For birth was a disease & Christopher and I invented the cure.
• For we swallow magic & deliver Anne.

"Eighth Psalm"

• For she is lost from mankind; she is knitting her own her into a baby shawl.
• For she is a magnitude, she is many. She is each of us patting ourselves dry with a towel.
• For she is nourished by darkness.
• For there are many worlds of milk to walk through under the moon.

"Tenth Psalm"

• For as her child grows Anne grows & there is salt and cantaloupe and molasses for all.
• For Anne sat down with the blood of a hammer & built a tombstone for herself and Christopher sat besides her & was well pleased with their red shadow.
• For God was as large as a sunlamp & laughed his heat at us and therefore we did not cringe at the death hole.

"Rowing"

• First came the crib with its glacial bars. Then dolls & the devotion to their plastic mouths.
• but undersea all the time, a stranger whose elbows wouldn't work.
• Then there was life with its cruel houses & people who seldom touched -- though touch is all --
• but I grew, like a pig in a trenchcoat I grew
• and then there were many strange apparitions, the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison & all of that, saws working through my heart, but I grew, I grew, and God was there like an island I had not rowed to, still ignorant of Him
• I am rowing, I am rowing though the oarlocks stick & are rusty and the sea blinks & rolls like a worried eyeball, but I am rowing, I am rowing, though the wind pushes me back & I know that island will not be perfect, it will have the flaws of life, the absurdities of the dinner table, but there will be a door & I will open it and I will get rid of the rat inside of me, the gnawing pestilential rat. God will take it with his two hands & embrace it.
• This story ends with me still rowing.

"Riding the Elevator into the Sky"

• These are the warnings that you must forget if you're climbing out of yourself. If you're going to smash into the sky.
• silence wearing its sneakers
• And a key, a very large key, that opens something -- some useful door -- somewhere -- up there.

"When Man Enters Woman"

• and her teeth gleam like the alphabet
• and the woman climbs into a flower & swallows its stem

"The Earth"

• God loafs around heaven, without a shape but He would like to smoke His cigar or bite His fingernails and so forth.
• God owns heaven but He craves the earth, the earth with its little sleepy caves, its bird resting at the kitchen window, even its murders lined up like broken chairs, even its writers digging into their souls with jackhammers
• but most of all He envies the bodies, He who has no body.
• The eyes, opening & shutting like keyholes and never forgetting, recording by thousands, the skull with its brains like eels -- the tablet of the world -- the bones & their joints that build & break for any trick, the genitals, the ballast of the eternal, and the heart, of course, that swallows the tides & spits them out cleansed.
• He does not envy the soul so much. He is all soul but He would like to house it in a body & come down and give it a bath now and then.

"Jesus, the Actor, Plays the Holy Ghost"

• I wash the crows but they do not whiten. I push out the desk, pulling it from its roots. I shave the caterpillar but he is only a worm.
• Will I marry the dark earth, the thief of the daylight?
• save me from the cockroach, weave me into the sun
• My elbows will be salt.
• Let me float in like a fish. Let me in! Let me in! I have been born many times, a false Messiah, but let me be born again into something true.

"Frenzy"

• I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.
• Oh angels, keep the windows open so that I may reach in & steal each object, objects that tell me the sea is not dying, objects that tell me the dirt has a life-wish, that the Christ who walked for me, walked on true ground & that this frenzy, like bees stinging the heart all morning, will keep the angels with their windows open, wide as a bathtub.

"The God-Monger"

• I went in search of the other world which I reached by digging underground, past the stones as solemn as preachers, past the roots, throbbing like veins
• There I found a mouse with trees growing out of his belly
• The soul was not cured, it was as full as a clothes closet of dresses that did not fit.

"Small Wire"

• God does not need too much wire to keep Him there, just a thin vein, with blood pushing back & forth in it, and some love.
• As it has been said: Love & a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
• So if you have only a thin wire, God does not mind. He will enter your hands as easily as ten cents used to bring forth a Coke.

"The Rowing Endeth"

• I'm mooring my rowboat at the dock of the island called God. This dock is made in the shape of a fish
• And salt sticking to my face & arms like a glue-skin pocked with grains of tapioca.

"The Money Swing"

• so like Zelda & Scott with drinks and cigarettes and turbans and designer slacks & frizzy permanents and all that dough, what do you say to me now, here at my sweaty desk in 1971?
• swinging like children on the money swing up & over, up & over, until even New York City lies down small

"Food"

• for I need to suck the sky
• I am hungry & you give me a dictionary to decipher.
• I am a baby all wrapped up in its red howl & you pour salt into my mouth.
• and although I suck I suck air & even the big fat sugar moves away
• I need food & you walk away reading the paper.

"Whale"

• We are sick of babies crying & the birds flapping loose in the air. We want the double to be big, and ominous & we want to remember when you were money in Massachusetts and yet were wild and rude and killers. We want our killers dressed in black like grease for we are sick of writing checks, putting on our socks & working in the little boxes we call the office.

"Divorce, Thy Name is Woman"

• I am divorcing daddy... I have been doing it daily all my life
• Daddy of the whiskies, daddy of the rooster breath, would visit & then dash away as if I were a disease.
• I have been divorcing him ever since, going into court with Mother as my witness & both long dead or not I am still divorcing him, adding up the crimes of how he came to me, how he left me.
• I am pacing the bedroom. Opening & shutting the windows. Making the bed & pulling it apart. I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows, waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home & stuff me so full of our infected child that I turn invisible, but married, at last.

"The Consecrating Mother"

• I wanted to share this but I stood alone like a pink scarecrow. The ocean steamed in & out, the ocean gasped upon the shore but I could not define her, I could not name her mood, her locked-up faces. Far off she rolled & rolled like a woman in labor and I thought of those who had crossed her
• though the ocean comes in its destiny, with its one hundred lips, and in moonlight she comes in her nudity, flashing breasts made of milk-water
• I am that clumsy human on the shore loving you, coming, coming, going

"What has it come to, Dr. Y."

• I move my thin legs into your office & we work over the cadaver of my soul. We make a stage set out of my past & stuff painted puppets into it. We make a bridge toward my future & I cry to you: I will be steel! I will build a steel bridge over my need! I will build a bomb shelter over my heart! But my future is a secret. It is as shy as a mole.
• What has it come to my needing you... I am the irritating pearl & you are the necessary shell. You are the 12 faces of the Atlantic & I am the rowboat. I am the burden.
• Time after time I fall down into the well & you dig a tunnel in the dangerous sand, you take the altar from a church & shore it up. With your own white hands you dig me out. You give me hoses so I can breathe.
• You make me a skull to hold the worms of my brains.
• The trees are whores yet you place me under them. The sun is poison yet you toss me under it like a rose. I am out of practice at living. You are as brave as a motorcycle.
• I would be Jesus without a cross to prove me.

"I called him Comfort"

• And I said, "God is only mocked by believers!"
• And he said, "I love only the truth." And I said, "This holy concern for the truth -- no one worries about it except liars."

"It's music you've never heard"

• but pop songs in my kitchen radio bleating like a goat
• Songs like cherries in a bowl, sweet & sour & small.
• From me to you out of my electric devil but easy like the long skirts in a Renoir picnic with clouds & parasols.

"January 24th"

• I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map & there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is. It's in a vapor. It's in a flap. It makes jelly. It chews toads. It's a dummy. It's a whiz.
• Sometimes I have to track her. Sometimes I have to hunt her down. Sometimes I hold her still & use a nutcracker.
• Such conceit! Such maggoty thoughts, such an enormous con just cracks me up.

"February 23rd"

• My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things.
• I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch. Each like an advertisement for change. My husband always plays King & is continually shopping in his head for a queen when only clown, carpenter, nurse, witch can be seen.
• There was a strange power to it. Power in that lovely paper.
• My own ideas are a curse for a king & a queen. I'm a wound without blood, a car without gasoline unless I can shake myself free of my dog, my flag, of my desk, my mind, I find life a bit of a drag. Not always, mind you. Usually I'm like my frying pan -- useful, graceful, sturdy & with no caper, no plan.

"In Excelsis"

• I am almost afraid, so long gone from the sea. I have seen her smooth as a cheek, I have seen her easy, doing her business, lapping in. I have seen her rolling her hoops of blue. I have seen her tear the land off. I have seen her drown me twice, and yet not take me.
• You tell me that as the green drains backward it covers Britain, but have you never stood on that shore & seen it cover you?
• I wish to enter her like a dream, leaving my roots here on the beach like a pan of knives. And my past to unravel, with its knots & snarls, and walk into ocean, letting it explode over me & outward, where I would drink the moon & my clothes would slip away, and I would sink into the great mother arms I never had
• except here where the abyss throws itself on the sand blow by blow, over and over, and we stand on the shore loving its pulse as it swallows the stars, and has since it all began & will continue into oblivion, past our knowing & the wild toppling green that enters us today, for a small time in half winter, half spring.