" . . . then he began wanting

                                                to make a book

                        of what he had seen and how it went on"

                                                W.S. Merwin

When I was seven I tore the covers from an old book (Treasure Island as I recall now)  and made my own so I could pretend I had written it.  That act of destruction was also an act of reverence, and where it came from and why it has endured little changed for sixty years, I have no idea, only that it did and it has.

Poetry, indeed any art, seems to me first a way of seeing and only then of saying, whether with words or paints, stone or clay, metal or fabric, whatever one's medium of perception, interpretation and expression.  The poetry I came to be most affected by began in the intimacy of a place or moment and passed into revelation, returning again to intimacy in the sensibility of each reader. 

These few of mine are of different times and places, one and different lives, but, I would like to believe, begin and end in gratitude for my own  sacred places, transforming moments and enduring memories.

In a way that is more than just metaphorical, I believe  everyone has a book in them.  Life is about finding it and then listening to it.