Your heart is a secret...

Poetry is an invitation to meditate upon the experience of mystery and the mystery of experience.

The task of the poet is to make the mysteriousness of experience palpably vivid in a way that does not resolve the mystery but, instead reveals the mystery as more profoundly mysterious than we realized.

Poets teach us about experience. They teach us about our own experience. They teach us about the way we experience what we experience. With great care and reverent luminosity, poets teach us to more fully experience our experience. They do this not by teaching us how to put our experience into poetry, nor by teaching us how to experience a poem, but by showing us that poetry is always-already present in experience, itself. Poetry is the experience of everything. And thus, every experience is an experience of poetry.

We are full of secrets, and poetry is the fossil record of the human condition, maybe even the fossil record of the human soul.

Buried beneath the compacted layers of sediment is the history of human longing, the music of our millennia of tragedies and triumphs, the rapturous soliloquy of our radiant splendor; the joy, grief, sorrow, lament, despair, our excitement, exhilaration, and our exuberance.

Each poem is an act of faith; a faith that some minute piece of the manifold mystery will become material for a moment. A faith that some small substance of the things hoped for will become manifest, albeit, perhaps, in an ephemeral way. A faith that we will uncover the evidence of things unseen; the evidence of the possible. The possibility will claim meaning, and in the meaning we will find the secret of our hearts...

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