Boxing Has Become America's Tragic Theater.

But He Doesn't Love Her. I Invented That. It Is A Plot If You Imagine People In Love--the Lazy Looping Criss Crosses Of Love, Blows, Stares, Tears. No. It Doesn't Happen. No Love. People Meet, Touch, Stare Into One Another's Faces, Shake Their Heads Clear, Move On, Forget. It Doesn't Happen.

The Television Screen, So Unlike The Movie Screen, Sharply Reduced Human Beings, Revealed Them As Small, Trivial, Flat, In Two Banal Dimensions, Drained Of Color. Wasn't There Something Reassuring About It! -- That Human Beings Were In Fact Merely Images Of A Kind Registered In One Another's Eyes And Brains, Phenomena Composed Of Microscopic Flickering Dots Like Atoms. They Were Atoms -- Nothing More. A Quick Switch Of The Dial And They Disappeared And Who Could Lament The Loss?

How Does The Poet Transform His Banal Thoughts (are Not Most Thoughts Banal?) Into Such Stunning Forms, Into Beauty?

Betrayal Is The Deepest Wound. Betrayal Is What Remains Of Love, When Love Has Gone.

For What Are The Words With Which To Summarize A Lifetime, So Much Crowded Confused Happiness Terminated By Such Stark Slow-motion Pain?