A poem always begins for me with an image, often something I’ve seen or come across that at first seems unremarkable and ordinary but that stays with me, lodged somewhere between consciousness and the world of dreams, until I find myself using it as the cornerstone of a poem. I had seen the box in an exhibit of items to be auctioned, had no intention of bidding on it, and then found my hand shooting into the air when the auctioneer was saying “are there any more bids? Going, going . . .”

I also will never forget the surprise, a shock really, of that enormous bird in the park adjacent to the bus stop a block from my house. The poem is a simple reporting of what took place there and what I had seen over the years in the park.