This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.

Zen is the vehicle of reality.

Sometimes the only answer to death is lunch.

So when I made some money, I didn't have any idea how one handled such a situation because no one in our family ever had any money.

I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.

That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.

Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.