The question is not how like the animals we are
But how we got that way. We laugh, for what is a suicide note

But the epitaph of an emotion? Few of us die out in the open;

In retrospect it was romantic to be the lonely American recovering from 
        pneumonia, living in a hotel room with a typewriter
        and a sink in a Left Bank hotel in a gray Paris winter.

As a boy (who destroyed his eyesight
Reading in the dark by flashlight)
I went to the library

I.  In the sixth grade 
          Eisenhower to go down to South America 
          And Mrs. Goldman to write on the board, 

I never liked the World Trade Center.
When it went up I talked it down
as did many other New Yorkers.

Poetry is to jazz
as literature is to music
as Lake Como is to the Arno River

And then they are there all of the people depressed 
Into tattoos or footprints or names plastered 
Or carved into wood or wall 

Do you have a favorite time of day? Favorite weather?
Tell me about your writing process.
Is that so? I would never have guessed.

The film begins in Venice
As conceived by the dreamer before
He begins his journey, which ends

The first time I met Wittgenstein, I was
late. “The traffic was murder,” I explained.
He spent the next forty-five minutes