When I was looking up peace poems by Thomas Merton, I came across Arthur W. Biddle's Thomas Merton & Robert Lax: A Friendship in Letters. I didn't know that Robert Lax and Thomas Merton met as students at Columbia University in 1935 and became lifelong friends. When I found a photo of Lax on the back flap cover of his 33 Poems (1988), he looked like Saint Jerome or Saint Anthony, one of the Desert Fathers. I like Lax's minimalist style, his string bean poems appear as thin Giacometti statues. I'm including three such poems from Lax's A Thing That Is (1997). By putting one word per line, and often splitting a word into several lines (ex-is-tence), Lax slows down our reading of his poems. Perhaps this is intended as a meditation exercise in patience (Poem 10). Poem 27 is my favorite Lax poem. It reminds me of Plotinus's vision in his Enneads that all beauty has a divine origin. After falling in love with Robert Lax's poetry, I received two handwritten letters from Steve Georgiou postmarked in San Francisco about his book The Way of the Dreamcatcher: Spirit Lessons with Robert Lax: Poet, Peacemaker, Sage. I was too busy to respond, but attended his talk at the Stanford Bookstore (Oct. 4, 2005). It was indeed a treat to see his slide presentation of Robert Lax in Patmos and hearing Lax reading his poem on the Virgin Mary. (Peter Y. Chou)