From the forward: The world stands up. The sentence points to something and is an instance of this something. The world stands up in the statement. Such is the nature of language, a natural occurrence, rising with the irises in April, the sandhill cranes in September. Any written word stands up first in the mind - thought being another natural occurrence. Early hominids devoted enormous amounts of precious energy to evolving a neocortex, home of human thought. As a result, mentation has become the dominant characteristic of our species. Most of us, most in the time, live first in a mental topography. The poems in this book are instances. Each points to a world standing up before our thinking, before our saying anything about it, to ourselves or anyone else. I hope reading them refreshes your experience of this world, as writing them has refreshed mine.