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

The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.

I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.

A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

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