“It’s not words we need tonight, but the antidote to what has already been said. Yes, there’s a man sitting lakeside in an idling car. Yes, there’s a slug crossing a road in the rain, and a drugstore where people sway like tropical leaves—in a wind that thinks of antibacterial soap and condoms, a two liter of coke. Yes, my father is dying and the soil turns with its vocabulary of beetles, its glistening, diamond vowels. Yes, any face is a temporary face, and God knows enough about when the mangoes must turn red, when the garbage man must wake in the dark. Here. There. A bowl left out in the rain. We fill it with so many thoughts. As if afraid to merely live in love. As if even this fear belonged to us.”