When I Was Teaching, I Gave A

Smile As You Find A Rhythm Working You, Slow Mile By Mile, Into Your Proper Haunt.

No Bit Of The Natural World Is More Valuable Or More Vulnerable Than The Tree Bit. Nothing Is More Like Ourselves, Standing Upright, Caught Between Heaven And Earth, Frail At The Extremities, Yet Strong At The Central Trunk, And Nothing Is Closer To Us At The Beginning And At The End, Providing The Timber Boards That Frame Both The Cradle And The Coffin.

Debate Doesn’t Really Change Things. It Gets You Bogged In Deeper. If You Can Address Or Reopen The Subject With Something New, Something From A Different Angle, Then There Is Some Hope. ... People Are Suddenly Gazing At Something Else And Pausing For A Moment. And For The Duration Of That Gaze And Pause, They Are Like Reflectors Of The Totality Of Their Own Knowledge And/or Ignorance. That’s Something Poetry Can Do For You, It Can Entrance You For A Moment Above The Pool Of Your Own Consciousness And Your Own Possibilities.

I Credit Poetry For Making This Space-walk Possible.

To Begin With, I Wanted That Truth To Life To Possess A Concrete Reliability, And Rejoiced Most When The Poem Seemed Most Direct, An Upfront Representation Of The World It Stood In For Or Stood Up For Or Stood Its Ground Against.