I rather like the permeability of this room
because so many of my poems are about,
in one way or another, remaining permeable to the suffering
of the world.
And every time I hear a siren, it's
either an ambulance or a fire truck, probably.
Somebody is having a bad moment when we hear a siren.
This poem Katherine referred to in her introduction.
"As If Hearing Heavy Furniture Moved on the Floor Above Us."
"As things grow rarer, they enter the ranges of counting.
Remain this many Siberian tigers,
that many African elephants, three hundred
red-legged egrets.
We scrape from the world its tilt and meander of wonder,
as if eating the last burned onions and carrots
from a cast iron pan.
Closing eyes to taste better the char of ordinary sweetness."