PREFACE

Poems are marks of our wanderings---blazes that glint in the forest and permits others to follow our trail. Who are we? Why are we here? And where is here? We meet others, live a while together, seek the balm of love, ask our questions, then go our way, always alone. The simplest moments of our lives are incredibly strange. We measure, we calculate, we use language. We search for clarity, and when we find it there is still mystery. Music and dreams and our stories, shapes and colors and dance, all celebrate our search. We wish for magic, but have none. We are no closer to understanding than the first one who thought to ask the questions. All that we know reveals nothing of the immensity we inhabit. All we can do is meet it with courage, leave a poem, go on.

----Howard McCord

Your choices:

• In The Flower World
• Listening to Maps
• A Poem for Carl Thayler
  (also in Cantonese, with sound file)
• In Iceland
  (also with Icelandic translation)
• A Report from the Rand Corporation
• Solitude
• Two Poems Beginning “In America”
• More Physics
• On the Way to Walmart
• To the Recently Divorced Mother of a Child with Cerebral Palsy
• Philosophy Tout Nu
• Where Things Go
• Three Unforgettable Sights
• The Rim of the Great Basin
• Some Information About the Devil
• Kathmandu Valley: A Hillside
• It's Getting Dark