Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.

Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.

We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.

I'm certainly not opposed to digital technology, whose graces I daily enjoy and rely on in so many ways. But I worry about our virtual blinders.

And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.

... love is an act of sedition, a revolt against reason, an uprising in the body politic, a private mutiny.

Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do