We had an office in our house in Indiana that is the model for this one. Because that office is in my head, I have a hard time reading the poem and knowing whether I’ve really captured what I still see about that space.

But I’ve got the important parts, I think–how my mom did art in that office, how she stacked her art onto shelves and filled the desktop (the whole house really) with art stuff and tchotchke cats, not just ceramic, but wooden and wire and metal and cork.

I went back and forth on the “person” in line one, settling finally on Curiosity, but starting with Love and then using Hope for many of the drafts.

The idea to write a poem where Love was a person came from reading “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. In the last two lines he writes, “What did I know, what did I know/of love’s austere and lonely offices?”

And of course that also placed my mind in a physical office. That is such a straightforward origin story for a poem–it’s a bit striking, really.

I caught this turtle yesterday on a long walk with my wife, celebrating our 30th anniversary in New Hope, Pennsylvania. We were on a towpath next to a canal and I found a spot to climb up above the canal and look down.

Right there below me were two turtles, this one and a smaller one that was swimming directly over top. I rushed to get out my phone camera but missed that first shot–you could see the shadow of the smaller turtle on the back of this one–but I’m pretty happy that I got this shot at all.

You can see the moss growing on her back, feathery and full. I love it.