At the Thanksgiving table this year my friend told the story of the raccoons who took up residence in the enclosed space above his front porch and how he inticed them to leave by setting up a speaker and playing AM talk radio through the wall, loud and constant, until they fled.

And I thought of my news hiatus, now in its third week, and how that stuff will drive you mad and it won’t go away so you have to, tho even on hiatus the words get through, like the sound of trucks on the highway, barges on the river, they’re in the air, they’re in the water, discernable at the most vanishing of parts-per-million

Still, distance is my friend and maybe yours, too, when something like sanity meets you in that poet’s field beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right, we think we’re so smart but we could learn a thing from those raccoons who at least recognize when they’re under assault and don’t need a poem to remind them of an elsewhere.