I mean, often when I praise poetry in terms of how it serves and how it functions in our culture, I think about poetry giving language to the ineffable, you know, we have these experiences or dynamics that kind of just defy banal language and cliche. And then you find the poem and you're like, Oh, this is it. I carry you. I carry me. I carry you in my heart. You know, exactly what that means. This poem actually, I think functions in a very different way. It doesn't give me that language. Right. Oh, there's the tool perfect. Now I can go ahead, keep hammering along. You know what I mean? It's almost like the poem constructs its own emotional vocabulary that beautifully only functions within the poem. It's like the moment you leave the house of this poem, if you try to explain any of these lines to be like, what are you talking about? Your sheet music butterflies, huh? You know, but as long as you're in the house of the poem, everything makes sense. And maybe that's a tribute to the power of lyricism when people talk about the difference between narrative and lyric poetry. Maybe that's what it is that it just it functions within the space that the artist has constructed. And that's enough. Yeah,

that's just beautifully put. And I love in the lyric how you are that I for that time of the poem. And I like to say just a few beats after at least, you hope. And I think that's very much true

with this poem. Absolutely.

Now in our June 13th, 2022 issue, the New Yorker published your poem, a spell to banish grief, which you'll read for us in a moment. Would you like to tell us anything brief about

the poem first? I guess I would say that I call this a hard-earned poem. I hope every poem that you know, people write isn't a hard-earned, where you're just like, I really had to live my way into this one.