The Shock, The Power Of An Ordinary

The Best Moments Involve A Loss Of Control. It's A Kind Of Rapture, And It Can Happen With Words And Phrases Fairly Often - Completely Surprising Combinations That Make A Higher Kind Of Sense, That Come To You Out Of Nowhere. But Rarely For Extended Periods, For Paragraphs And Pages - I Think Poets Must Have More Access To This State Than Novelists Do.

It's All About Time, Dimwit Time, Inferior Time, People Checking Watches And Other Devices, Other Reminders. This Is Time Draining Out Of Our Lives. Cities Were Built To Measure Time, To Remove Time From Nature. There's An Endless Counting Down, He Said. When You Strip Away Surfaces, When You See Into It, What's Left Is Terror. This Is The Thing That Literature Was Meant To Cure. The Epic Poem, The Bedtime Story.

Eye Contact Was A Delicate Matter. A Quarter Second Of A Shared Glance Was A Violation Of Agreements That Made The City Operational.

One Of My Earliest Memories As A Reader - I Don't Know How Old I Was, Quite Young - Was A Poem Of His, Called "fog," And I Remember The First Verse, "the Fog Comes / On Little Cat Feet".

The Term Itself--my Life--is A Desperate Overstatement.