The wanderer/observer, present in many of my poems, helps establish the distortion of time and memory my poetry explores, from a perspective as likely to be detached as to be intimate. There is an emotional tension that ties us to our past, to the universe and each other, through language, through an innate connection that will move forward to embrace the future. But poetry is crucial for creating the emotional tension not found in our ideas alone, for beneath this tension is the hidden story, its secret place where it declares itself as the unexpressed, the forgotten moment, a solitude of language realized through the imagined experience of silence. It is up to us to realize this tension, to understand it, and to disclose its subtleties to the world through our poetry. The poems found in the appendix of this project explore these secret places and forgotten moments.