This poem-- by getting this abstract-- has revived
in my mind a link back with the tornada of the earlier
book of "then comes the pale figure,
animated inchling of light."
Here we have this barge of light.
This wish to somehow come outside
of the liminal boundaries--
which on the human body is the skin,
which separates the inside from the outside.
But the question of this book got to be,
does making love on paper count?
Does that count?
Does a book ever make a very good suitor?
Books lasts longer than individual people, but--
[LAUGHTER]
And so, but by the time I finished this book,
I was soberer about the prospects of being a writer
and of being a human being.
And so, I chose for the epigraph this time something
from George Oppen.
"Not altogether alone in a lone universe that suffers time--
like stones in sun.
For we do not."
I thought it might be nice to suffer time like stones in sun.
But we do not.
And instead, for us the paper and the skin somehow
have to be resolved or conflated.