Those feral and yet sensuous flowers she so carefully shaped in muted colors express a desire to see the world as one's own place. Not the way history or the news or worriers say it is. Not resigned to any of those absolute or scientifically proven versions of reality. Simply recognizing that the world you love is the one you allow yourself to see.

So she paints on bread boxes, trivets, letter holders and a hundred other household and everyday items maybe in part so others know her world exists, but mostly for herself. Just one of the ways she remembers herself. And I imagine how we remember her.

This little tribute started off early in 1993 intending to become a birthday gift for William's 80th the following January. After his death the shape changed some but not the intention or destination. What you have now is a piece of lost mail pursuing an elusive address. One that is nowhere and, as Dorothy Stafford says, "is everywhere now." Above all I hoped for a birthday gift pleasing to him and heartfelt by those contributing.

As I poke around among words with my flashlight, I stumble across their nocturnal habits. For example, that the words relic and relinquish come from the same place, in Latin, relinquere, which means to leave behind. Our language holds those potentially extreme aspects together: the cherishing and the leaving, survival and defeat, the keepsake and that which is set aside forever, the relic and the relinquished. Also there's the recognition that this word tribute, tribuere, seems to come from tribu-s, meaning tribe. Now this fits him.

The contributors to this site are remembering or calling the same person, whether from the outside inwards or from inside themselves out. Invoking or evoking. Yet the strand between each of them and William was inevitably separate and singular. Now of course at some time most of us feel the thread as broken. But soon we read a poem of his or a line comes forward. Accordingly we have to say, he does his part. It seems like he always has. So around this little gathering, we want to begin to notice again with you how his poems are all around us. And, in the way we pay attention, to do our part.