Author's The largest and central section of poems included here have their roots, one way or another, in India, a place that, for me, has not meant gurus or exoticism but a welcome confrontation with many kinds of extremes. Classical Indian culture has asked all the questions, though its answers to the largest questions remain as uncertain for us as those bred by any other culture, except for the only two truths I really my years in India helped to strengthen my sense of the impermanence of everything and the complementary truth--but only within the single, individual life--of karma, literally action and the effects of action. We are what we do, not what we think or hope or dream.