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

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that preceded the poem.

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.

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

I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing.

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.

We love disasters that have nothing to do with us