When I was five, and the light of innocence made everything many orders of magnitude brighter than it is for adults, our teacher showed the class a large colored poster of a dog. Beneath the dog were these enigmatic marks. She asked the class the name of the dog, and there were several guesses: Spot, Trixie, Skipper, and so forth. Then the teacher pointed to the marks, and showed how they spelled the name TIP. My little five-year old self was flabbergasted. I realized these things called letters could represent any sound, anything in the world, and even things that were never in the world, and never could be. In that instant, I became a reader, an explorer in the realm of language.

Years later, as a teenager. From a rack of paperbacks in a drug store, I bought Walt Whitman's first version of Leaves of Grass. It cost me twenty-five cents. I read it walking on a country road threaded through rolling hills of fields and woods. I was enthralled. Here was scripture alive with love but never darkened by moral imprecation. Being a poet seemed the best way of being the world's most authentic, if still imperfect, lover. I started learning and practicing all the ways that I could of making words sing.

Then, in my early forties, I found a book on a sculptor who vowed to carve 100,000 Buddhas, and I thought, 'I vow to write 10,000 poems.' 10,000 is a big number. If you write one poem a day for 27 years and 4 months, you can do it. I cannot say: "I did it," but it was done. The ego "I" could never have been anything more than a copyist. The real author is the fertile unknown. As the years passed, single poems became groups of poems, like this book, Clutter. Longer works could more and more deeply explore the intricate interweavings of language, consciousness, and time. This discipline yielded more insights, different kinds of poems. Like a scientist, whose instrument was language, I had found a practice, at first glimpsed by that five year old, and later by the teenager, of exploring and creating deeper and deeper insights about myself and about the world.

I'm now past my mid 70's, and am a stage 4 cancer survivor. But in my mind, in my heart, I'm as amazed as that five year old discovering writing for the first time. Every day I work, and although there are reams of poetry behind me, I know I am just getting started.