Armando and Maisie follow a poet, his dog, and a homeless man whose quiet encounters in the woods of Central Park unfold into a tender portrait of friendship, aging, loss, and the grace of showing up for one another. What inspired you to turn these encounters into poetry?

I had been using the time I spent walking my lovely dog every morning in Central Park to also put together poems in my mind. We often went by Armando’s place in the Ramble Wild area of the Park, and when he was there, we would stop in for a visit. I found the interchange with him so vibrant and fun, especially his friendship with Maisie, which grew by leaps and bounds (they both did do leaps and bounds), that I began to compose poems about them after memorable meetings–not big events but subtle interchanges which interested me. So much in Armando’s life became increasingly vivid to me: his survival in a big city in the outdoors of a park, his easy wisdom about life’s priorities, his connection to animals, dogs, squirrels, coyotes, and birds. My instinct as a poet was to write poems about my gradual exploration of his way of being rather than to try to sum him up; little stories of our encounters seemed an excellent way to use poetry to understand an interesting fellow human and to plot the vagaries in our triple intersection, man, dog, man.

Maisie often serves as a bridge between you and Armando. How did writing about her shape the emotional heart of the book?

The poems show my friendship and respect for Armando. Most of the emotional substance comes from my perceptions of Maisie’s feelings about Armando and his response. I sometimes thought of myself like the Nick Carraway figure in The Great Gatsby, who is a somewhat removed witness to a great romance but therefore has the writer’s insight and freedom. There are central moments of love expressed between them that are major nodes of the story. As often as in great love stories, there are places of absence (Maisie misses him in a number of poems and yearns for him, but the loved one is away). And the hints and then realities of final parting quietly cast a sad emotion over the later poems. The relation of my protagonists gently and in a lesser mode describes the great arc of romance.

Themes of aging and absence surface quietly but persistently. How conscious were you of these themes as you wrote?

As I say above, they provide the overall form of the work, but I was writing in effect on the fly, giving snapshots of their relations as I was seeing them. I really fell into these themes as I found them; they are inevitably present in stories about connections with dogs, who seem tragically to prepare to leave us once they occupy our hearts. Writing about these themes with Armando and Maisie eventually allowed me to express my own sense of going out into the world with an aging dog; poems were written over a number of years, and my company with Armando allowed me to connect little by little with my own feelings of ongoing distance and loss.

How has sharing this work changed the way you think about brief or passing relationships?

I should begin by saying these were not brief or passing relationships. The three of us were involved together for over three years; I am still friends with Armando, who has been kind in his assessment of the poems, even allowed a report in the local paper, West Side Rag. So if anything, it has made me feel that we can find connection in what seem like everyday encounters, and they allow us to have significant relationships wherever we respond to people or animals. These were extraordinary dog and people folk, and they showed me how to show my readers what serious interest in others (or even in their dog treats) can open up for us.

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