Memoir Is Not An Act Of History

I Always Say That A Poet Loves The World, And The Prose Writer Needs To Create An Alternative World.

I Think We Fall In Love And Become Adults And Become Citizens In A Way By Writing Stories About Ourselves.

I Find A Great Deal Of Comfort And Care In My Faith And Prayer. I'd Sooner Do Without Air Than Prayer.

Ten Years, She's Dead, And I Still Find Myself Some Mornings Reaching For The Phone To Call Her. She Could No More Be Gone Than Gravity Or The Moon.

I Kept The Fingers Of My Left Hand Crossed All The Time, While On My Right-hand Fingers I Counted Anything At All—steps To The Refrigerator, Seconds On The Clock, Words In A Sentence—to Keep My Head Occupied. The Counting Felt Like Something To Hang On To, As If Finding The Right Numbers Might Somehow Crack The Code On Whatever System Ran The Slippery Universe We Were Moving Through.