LITTLE DOGS RHAPSODY IN THE NIGHT (PERCY THREE) He puts his cheek against mine and makes small, expressive sounds. And when I'm awake, or awake enough he turns upside down, his four paws in the air and his eyes dark and fervent. Tell me you love me, he says. Tell me again. Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over he gets to ask it. I get to tell.

I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

And over one more set of hills, along the sea, the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness and are giving it back to the world. If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness.

We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.