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

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

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

I am attracted to looking at the different things language can mean even in one sometimes quite ordinary utterance. Writing is partly about listening closely to yourself as you think or compose and being aware of the different tensions and weights among the words, the different directions any one of them could lead. I like to play with the multiplicity and instability of meaning partly out of a sense of adventure, to see where that takes me and partly in a whistling past the graveyard kind of way because, of course, sensing stable meaning fall away can be scary.

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.

But here I hold your dream in my poem.

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.