Like all my poems, 'Negotiations' has several sources. It deals with aging lovers and the often silent deals they make. Thinking about bargains made me think of The Little Mermaid and that made me remember something I had just read about the incredibly complex process by which tadpoles (actual little mermaids) are somehow able to reabsorb their tails and fashion their future frog legs.

Poetry wants to make things mean more than they mean, says someone, as if we knew how much things meant, and in what unit of measure.

Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy.

The crowd is made of little gods, and there is still no heaven.

We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.

People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized." Maybe the poetry audience member is searching for his or her own "personal space" and they expect the poet to be a sort of avatar of the private life. But that sort of representation is distasteful to me. Asking a poet to represent the personal life is, paradoxically, to turn the poet into something other than a person.

Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture.