It's a dark morning, cool and humid. The clouds oppress the trees; the house smells of simmering tomato sauce; an NPR reporter murmurs in the kitchen. My mind is chattering to itself . . . about apples, and phoning the dog groomer, and German fairy tales, and that book about uranium I'm editing, and those songs I need to memorize for band practice tonight. Outside my window, a small bird is chattering in exactly the same rhythm as my brain--a curious duet; also an unnerving one.

"Too late in the wrong rain," wrote Dylan Thomas, "They come together whom their love parted:"

The windows pour into their heart
And the doors burn in their brain.

. . . and though on the surface those lines have nothing to do with me this morning, they ring, and evoke a disturbance within me; they make me frown--half in puzzlement, half acknowledging their accuracy. Perhaps the morning's broader horrors and ambiguities--the beheadings, the air strikes, the politicians, what to do--perhaps they, too, have infiltrated those lines, my reading of them, my perplexed response.

Poetry is both sufferance and suffering, I suppose.