Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.

Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.

Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.

I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.

There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March

Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance.

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.