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

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

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

Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the backpack. Their bedrock is thusness, their images beauty is pellucid and new, their view without limit. The shelf of essential Zen poets for American readers grows larger with this immediately indispensable collection.

How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.

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.

The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.