Jane Hirshfield describes poetry as her "first and continuing love," she once took a three-year hiatus from writing to practice her religion, Zen Buddhism, full-time. "For me, poetry, like Zen practice, is a path toward deeper and more life. There are ways to wake up into the actual texture of one's own existence, to widen it, to deepen and broaden it, and poetry is one of the things that does that. It connects the things I know intellectually, what I feel, what comes through the senses, history, sociology, politics, passions, Buddhist experience. It's the only place where that many kinds of thinking are joined." A translator of Asian poetry and an anthologist ("Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women," HarperCollins, 1994), Hirshfield brings a serene Eastern sensibility to Western themes. She's also one of the few poets with an active on-line life, as a long-term member of the computer bulletin board The WELL. "In daily life I know poets. On-line I know journalists, playwrights, mind-brain researchers, novelists. It's given me a broader community of writers. "What I'm concerned about for the health of poetry in this culture is that it be integrated into other areas of life and not be a ghetto. On-line is great for that because you can quote a line of Auden or put in a short poem. That's what's missing from poetry's relationship with the world. People need to see that what poetry has to offer, in terms of concentrated and expansive thought which can illuminate the situation, is useful to them in their everyday life." Even in January rains the blossoms open -- absence and longing are also the plum-fragrant spring. As the woman with her sign and cart of rags is spring, beside the highway, stepping slowly through the undimmed flower of her life. "What I now most want to happen in my raving heart, make it happen --" Sappho's cry to the goddess. Who knows if that prayer was answered? Each part holds the rest in the chill spring rain and the silence; let one animal eat from your hand and the whole herd comes. but the woman was not beautiful or whole in her heart's raving, and she forgave me nothing that I love. Jane Hirshfield's book "October Palace" is published by HarperCollins. photograph by Jerry Bauer