[Richard Wakefield]

I agree with Dick that a poet needs to love language and can be pardoned now and then for singing its praises. What makes this poem special, to me, is that it's about language as something intrinsic to our experience of the world and of ourselves. It insists that language, far from being an utterly arbitrary system of "signifiers," stitches our inner and outer lives together -- and more, perhaps our afterlives as well. Hence the stunning turn in the last line.
RPW