| The first line of this poem is a reference to W. S. Merwin's preface to his "Second Four Books of Poems," in which he writes that he "relinquished punctuation," because he had begun to feel that "it stapled the poems to the page." For Merwin, punctuation makes poetry overly rational. I am often (though not always) drawn to such relinquishing as well. Though it risks disorientation, letting go of the organizing principle of punctuation makes poetry both more and less rational for me. No matter how drifty things get, I have to be absolutely sure of what I'm saying, at least eventually, and think a lot about the penumbra of meaning each word casts, and how each one shadows and leads into the next. | 
