Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.

This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.

Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.