And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.

To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though the human being holds most of the cards.

And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.

Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me

Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.

Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the whole shifting tidal theater where I make small constructions, my metaphors, my defenses. Against which I play out theories, doubts, certainties bright as high tide in sunlight, which shift just as that brightness does, in fog or rain.

It's unsettling, to lose the safety of the familiar, even when what's disrupted is an ordinary routine. When I began this poem, I was grieving for the loss of my old barbershop in Manhattan, and wondering at the strangeness of my new one. I didn't have any idea the poem would break into the underworld, opening a deeper subject: the continuing force of the old griefs routine helps to mediate, and my strange, sheer wonder at my own survival. Where's home now? In the contingent present, in which anything can disappear, and where we're sometimes granted some form of grace.