Ghost Buffalo

A kind reader of Poetry Magazine has written a generous review of my six-line tetrameter, Hawk: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=470726175604&id=691489325&ref=nf

How Ticklishness Evolved What danger does he shrink from, when my nail skitters across the boundary of his tan — a tiger’s whisker-tip, a scorpion’s tail? What wriggler wrecked a cave bear’s dinner plan by waking up the world’s first ticklish man? Maybe it was a spider’s needle feet that triggered that first trembling retreat; perhaps the flicking of a serpent’s tongue, or something more insidious and sweet, whose touch was feather-soft before it stung. .

With thanks to those who alerted me to this : Verse Daily , which makes its selections from review copies of various magazines and books, has featured one of my tet sonnets on its homepage: http://www.versedaily.org/2010/intersection.shtml

Any society automatically teaches its people, just by the language it uses, to make certain assumptions about the world. Examples in Western culture would include the uniqueness of the individual, the reality and overwhelming importance of love, the necessity of freedom and social justice, and more complex, but just as strong, the basic separateness of each person. "We are born alone and we die alone." Our society, built upon the materialist eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, does not merely reject the notion of 'superconsciousness' or 'universal forces', we do not really know what they mean. - Rachel Pollack

One day as I woke up from a cicada's courting unbearably sexier than a human's I threw away the blanket of winter, and shed the skin of spring. - wu- shan-qian Perhaps we do think in language, but even a thought begins as sensation. Whether this is good or bad or of no consequence I do not know. I do know it has been a week of rain and harvest and sudden evening chill , which some say is not just a clue to the perennial queries, but a nuanced answer. Nemerov speaks of how human development might have fared, had music been the express evolutionary mode of communication. Oh, those heady speculators. They took everything from you -- the gowns, the wings, even your name, but I still believe in you, messengers. (Milosz)

So cheat your landlord if you must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal. - Burroughs

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance. - Mary Richards

Antiblurb This is not necessary. This is neither Crucial nor salvation. It is no hymn To harmonize the choirs of seraphim, Nor any generation's bold bellwether Leading the flock, no iridescent feather Dropped from the Muse's wing. It does not limn, Or speak in tongues, or voice the mute, or dim Outmoded theories with its fireworks. Rather This is flawed and mortal, and its stains Bear the evidence of taking pains. It did not have to happen, won't illumine The smirch of history, the future's omen. Necessity is merely what sustains — It's what we do not need that makes us human.

Beauty, more than bitterness, makes the heart break. - Sara Teasdale

Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you. -- Winnie the Pooh

Be he a king or a peasant, he is happiest who finds peace at home. - Goethe

. Driving round a bend and skidding on a mat of dead toads is very unpleasant for all concerned. . - Amanda Hillier

.. The Native people came. They walked the grass and found where sky agreed to name this land a sacred ground. A golden eagle flew and mountain mares were fed as afternoon withdrew and name by name the dead were resurrected here. No shaman could destroy the reverence and fear that filled my little boy. .

Kent Tompkins