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.

We love disasters that have nothing to do with us

What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?

No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.

...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.

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.

Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.