A moment of something between acceptance and resignation of one's smallness in the world.

A good many of my poems over the years have alluded to or taken on the political. Stevens has a line in one of his essays: "Reality exerts pressure on the imagination." Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 9/11, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm... all of those were forces informing the poems in some way.

I make myself up from everything I am, or could be. For many years I was more desire than fact. When I stop becoming, that’s when I worry.

What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C.... The often welcome melodic lie.... The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space.... a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned.

I’ll always deny that I kissed her. I was just whispering into her mouth.

Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.