I sometimes wonder whether I’m a very keen swimmer, and whether for me, poetry is equivalent to swimming. I’ve often noticed when I swim, the strangeness of the way the body literally turns into a fish, but the head remains human and rather cold, and looking around at this strange flat reflective surface. I’m often very piercingly aware of the difference between my head and my body when I’m swimming because I’m not necessarily someone who goes underwater, I love swimming along the surface of rivers. Perhaps, my poems do feel a need to convey that continued separation of the head remaining human and the body becoming animal, or plant, or mineral, or whatever it can be. In some way, I suppose I’m trying to find rhythms that will heal that divide.

I’m thinking now of two eardrumless girls, not in Kenya but India, sisters, street children, the last people my wife and I remember before the blast wind blew us, two travelers, off our feet, unconscious, to somewhere else, ultimately to here. They too have surely lost their eardrums yet likely they live and will live, unlike us, without them now.

If you spend a lot of time outdoors—and I had for a long time as a gardener—you develop a love of the assault and interruption that goes on when you are out in the natural world. The thing of being incapable of carrying your own meaning beyond the meaning of the grass, the weeds, the wind, the rain, the mud is something that I developed a liking for. I have not really wanted to make poems that prioritize my human meaning above the meanings that are going on around me. I love meaning but I like meaning to be interrupted before it gets too smug.