what she means calling

goose in flight over the bay

I cannot begin

to say but still I listen

moved as though on her broad wings

In his poems, whether tanka or free verse, Dean Schabner engages with the natural world not as symbol or metaphor, but as it is, finding there in fleeting instants and in stillness, depths of beauty born of love.

He seeks a purity of thought and language, conjuring a more essential state, in dialogue with the unconscious, yet full of intimacy -- with nature, with the beloved -- and the journey towards their convergence.