Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.

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

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

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

It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.

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