Ghost Buffalo

The road cannot make up her mind, the clock is tired of tracking time, the leak is leaping from the pail, the turtle flying through the air, the night has stolen the owl's chime, the moon has rolled away its rind, the poppies are rocking the rocking chair, the crickets are courting the spectacled bear, the aspen have eaten the magical pear, leaving a sprig in the pocket where the fisherman's wife had patched a tear within the sleeve of the the book of verbs, the fluttering souls of dancing girls, the eyelash of the hummingbird, the grain which paved the ocean's pearl.

----- Any poetry that's worth reading has an agenda. - Duncan Gillies MacLaurin

They had changed their throats, and had the throats of birds. - WBY Take that, and this, and another thing, Dr Williams.

Pity us by the sea on the sands so briefly. - Samuel Menashe

It may be esoteric and perverse That I consult Pythagoras to hear A music tuning in the universe. My interest in his math of star and sphere Has triggered theorems too far-fetched to solve. They don’t add up. But if I rack and toil More in ether than a mortal coil, It is to comprehend how you revolve, By formulas of orbit, ellipse, and ring. Dear son and daughter, if I seem to range It is to chart the numbers spiraling Between my life and yours until the strange And seamless beauty of equations click Solutions for the heart’s arithmetic. - Wilmer Mills

1. Zhaghzhagh (Persian) The chattering of teeth from the cold or from rage. 2. Yuputka (Ulwa) A word made for walking in the woods at night, it’s the phantom sensation of something crawling on your skin. 3. Slampadato (Italian) Addicted to the UV glow of tanning salons? This word describes you. 4. Luftmensch (Yiddish) There are several Yiddish words to describe social misfits. This one is for an impractical dreamer with no business sense. Literally, air person. 5. Iktsuarpok (Inuit) You know that feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet? This is the word for it. 6. Cotisuelto (Caribbean Spanish) A word that would aptly describe the prevailing fashion trend among American men under 40, it means one who wears the shirt tail outside of his trousers. 7. Pana Po’o (Hawaiian) “Hmm, now where did I leave those keys?” he said, pana po’oing. It means to scratch your head in order to help

Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and in excess is attended by fatal consequences. (Walter Savage Landor)

Studying the meters is a labor of love for the devoted poet, but even in the midst of study, the best of the disciples know it wasn't the academics, or even the poets who invented prosody, but Nature herself who has given us rhythm, schism, repetition, inundation, intonation, variation, calamity, diversity, clarity, the established pattern, the spinning tandem, the seemingly random.

As the eldest child prepares herself for another year another year another year a final year of high school, as the youngest child wakes up from the humming little X Box and opens up his books, As the husband returns from Sturgis with a rumbling sense of the road and the deepening scent of coming home, the mom looks to the rapid world, and murmurs oh ... slow, slow, slow.

Local Writers Conference upcoming, featuring workshops by Colorado Laureate, Dave Mason, Leslie Marmon Silko, Will Hobbs, yrs truly, and others. Details here: The Language

Don’t compromise, don’t water it down, don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. (Kafka)

One reads poetry with one's nerves. - Wallace Stevens

------ Henceforth, in using the word Poetry, I mean both the controlled and uncontrollable parts of the art taken together, because each is helpless without the other. - Robert Graves I made it out of a mouthful of air. -Yeats The elder poet advises the younger: Mystery abides. - Hirsch