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The forms of freedom are not without constraint.  If we do not know how to restrain, retrain, our desires, then we will not know how to align our power to the limited resources of the world.  If we do not begin to reimagine our power, we will use it to constrain others.  How to convey the urgency of making choices and decisions which lead to forms of life that do not impinge on others, bully them into agreement, mock context, trivialize faith, thwart rights, waste resources, collude need with want?  Poets, I want to say, are expert at the complex ratio of limit to possibility.

Poetry, I want to suggest, is one way to not be surprised by death.

--ann lauterbach ['9/11: after the fall', p. 234; the night sky: writings on the poetics of experience, viking, 2005]