Here: two lives. In the first, practical life, you feed the kids. You do many other things, but all these other things are pointing in one direction – toward feeding the kids. This applies even if you don’t have kids by way of extension or abstraction, for feeding the kids is a metaphor for the caring for the body, for the continuation of the human, of yourself as a human.

In the other life, you are removed from this task of feeding the kids; you are granted a reprieve. Whim on the door lint, you’re not home. “Words say, Misspell and misspell your name / Words say, Leave this life” (Michael Palmer, “Baudelaire Series”).

In a recent article about schizophrenia, the author describes one woman’s encounter with the disease as living always with the question of whether she is “here” or “not here.” The person who is “here” is feeding the kids. The person who is “not here” might be writing a poem, might be abiding, instead, in the poem. (And I don’t mean to make an easy and old parallel between mental illness and poetry, but rather to admit that I recognize the question: here or not here?)