Uselessness. I yearned for utility. I thought if only I were an expert on something. Then I could teach others. I rearranged my life and set off for a doctoral program to earn the credentials to teach. But I hungered to know, to study how we are creative and what profound emotional response we as humans have to creation. We aspire. We strive. We create. But now that I am a student again, I hear this too-constant refrain: "Don't get creative. Just supply the answer to the questions. And be sure to provide subheadings."

Usefulness. I am fierce in defense of those who are disempowered. I grow taller than my five feet three inches even as I am diminishing with age. (A paradox and a loss of bone mass.) If I had been born in a different age, I would have been a suffragette, a do-gooder, a menace. If I had not been born at all, I would have been an avenging angel.

My favorite lines from a poem express a devout wish. They belonged first to Muriel Rukeyser who wrote them. They belong now to me and will one day be my epitaph borne aloft by wind.

"I want strong peace, and delight, the wild good. I want to make my touch poems: to find my morning...."