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

Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.

I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.

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

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.

In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.

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