Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

"And" seems to me closest. "And" nods toward the real. And "and" is the path to perspective. To feel and see from more angles and know all of them true, even the incomprehensible ones, even the ones that contradict one another.

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.

Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.