I wrote this poem as part of a collaboration I did in spring of 2008 with the painter Chris Uphues. Chris and I met at a bar after a reading I had given, and he told me he was a painter. I had a feeling he would be good. He sent me photos of ten paintings via email and I was blown away by his work, so I took his titles and wrote ten corresponding poems. Chris’s paintings for me work like poems: you get a general sense of what’s going on at the beginning, and then as your perception of the painting sharpens (like hearing or reading more lines of the poem as move through it) you get to a more developed idea of the situation, and your emotional involvement deepens. In some of the poems, like this one, I take elements of the painting and use them in the poem, while also creating a separate scene or interaction that can incorporate those elements. Other poems are more obliquely related to the paintings. In this poem the “she” asks the narrator about the meaning of the apocalyptic scene depicted (which for her is not a painting, but a dream). During the time of these collaborations I was living in an apartment, a.k.a. a tenement in the East Village which was filled with the owner’s disturbing and somehow very powerful quasi-primitive art. Outside my window I could see an extension cord leading from one of the apartments above me down into the street, presumably for a purpose. That was the time of the terrible persecution of the monks in Myanmar by their government, and of course a lot of that all the time was on the radio. So all those things wandered into the poem.