Ghost Buffalo

The prince's robes and beggar's rags Are toadstools on the miser's bags. A truth that's told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent. It is right, it should be so Man was made for joy and woe, And when this we rightly know Through the world we safely go

Kafka is said to have kept a sign above his desk which said: Wait.

When a mother is suddenly home alone on a summer night, when the silence she has longed for is just right, when the breeze is on, when the dusk is long and everyone at home is gone, she moves around to the soft sound of being alone, of being her own beckoning call in the missing them all. .

Poets think they are pitchers but they are catchers. .- - Jack Spicer

. A woman’s hair moves at one-tenth its former speed, like lace curtains billowing off a shock of window on a most uneventful day, the way you sometimes might see summer rain-- a wave of linens hanging from the sun. And the older you get, it doesn’t part, just compresses, as you start to dwell beneath the shed of moments falling over you--pile of wet autumn leaves. Someone finally asks, “Can you ever be in love again?” But you're at an age when you must confess, the distance to this life in love is too far for, “Yes.” And then you lose your fear of death. -- Clem .

. Last night my son took a spoon and sculpted a stylized heart in a bowl of yoghurt. Last week two dear friends photographed heart-shaped stones. My friend Beth observed on Saturday that the horse we were admiring had a marking shaped like a heart. The song my daughter wrote for Father’s Day on Sunday was of course, signed with a heart. The bracelet my husband gave me for my birthday was engraved with small silver hearts. Indeed it seems that every garden and every home I enter, no matter how cynical or drunken or bedraggled the proprietor, heart-shaped designs emerge -- on wind chimes, paintings, banners stuck in lawns, refrigerator magnets, vases, paperweights, bars of soap. Call it corny, but we have embraced this ancient symbol and celebrate it everywhere. Gandhi tells us, Culture of mind must be subservient to heart. Confucius observes: Laws and words do not rule the world: symbols do . The symbol for the heart appears to have originated as an indication, not just of romantic lov

in hoc signo vinces

. - - Did the ancients ask of the sun, What shall I do , or what have I done . - Plato: “the motions akin to the divine parts in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe; these, therefore, every man should follow.” As above, so below. The Egyptian term for this order was Ma’at , in India it is Dharma , and in China, Tao , or The Way . Today in the West we call it New Age Malarkey , or as my dear friend Art G calls it, Newage, (rhymes with sewage). Mecocosm : a mediating middle cosmos, through which the microcosm of the individual is brought into relation to the macrocosm of the universe. So where did the New Age miss a crucial turn ? From its first step. The fundamental distinction between metaphysics and monotheism is always a matter, not of who spirit is, but of its primary residence: ‘out there’ (in mind, vaulted sky, and rainbow), or here, in scent, flesh, base metal, bone, stone, and yes, of course, poem. Even conventional religion knows to revere and invoke the elemen

. . .

- Miroslav Holub To amuse His Royal Majesty he will change water into wine. Frogs into footmen. Beetles into bailiffs. And make a Minister out of a rat. He bows, and daisies grow from his finger tips. And a talking bird sits on his shoulder. There. Think up something else, demands His Royal Majesty. Think up a black star. So he thinks up a black star. Think up dry water. So he thinks up dry water. Think up a river with straw bands. So he does. There. Then along comes a student and asks: Think up sine alpha greater than one. And Zito grows pale and sad: Terribly sorry. Sine is between plus one and minus one. Nothing you can do about that. And he leaves the great royal empire, quietly weaves his way through the throng of courtiers, to his home in a nutshell.

Body says to shadow how do you keep up ? .. - Gary Snyder photo Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

i heart u said the lichen to the stone said the speckle to the roan said the sand to the foam said the flesh to the bone. photo Dan Rosen