I have friends who swear they were born pagans. I was born a Manichean, an original distruster of flesh and blood. Somehow I always believed that what lay between the spirit and its rightful destiny was materiality, body and its playpen of stuff. Pesky things to nonchalantly pay up in order to reach the divine highway. Too many self-mortifying saints or too much of my mother's family's Christian Science: who knows. Children are great theologians. As a teenager I developed a drug habit and became an earnest fritterer of the flesh.

That this attitude has a tong and honorable history among poets, intensifying in the 20th century with writers like Schwartz and Sexton, was not lost on me. I counted myself among the acolytes who wore their flesh-tampering robes to the aesthetic altar. Poems formed a resistance, a disembodied voice, a dark cloister built to hold a bleached and bloodless life. Sure. The material nature of language began to nag after a while; in the most material words, the onomatapoeic (and who knows how many words really are onomatapoeic?), things come into friction and become the utterance of their basic nature, a bad dream of Platonism.

Falling in love with life is insidious, like realizing you sound just like your father on the subject of apple trees. Deep ligaments hold us to this home spun from the maya of DNA. One thing gets in through the gnostic fence, a beloved book, and it trails the musty smell of paper, and the tree. And you find yourself in love and realize that what we call God must love the world too, though it's painful. Like a healthy person prodding a sore tooth against the tongue. The necessary pain. We are the sore tooth in the mouth of something. Evoked secretly and extravagantly, many times a day.

Of these poems The World Rising as a Mirror is the earliest; Seeing it All as the Bardo latest. The poems attempt to treat the numinous, from dogwood tree to department store, one thing after another.