Ghost Buffalo

Red State Reveille Daybreak. A youth at Fargo's Jiffy Lube reloads his grease gun with an oil-stained tube, prints out the service records on my truck, changes three filters fouled with gunk or muck, rotates the tires and drains the filthy oil, tops up my fluds. Happy with his toil, grinning broadly, he send me on my way, in time for Mass. God bless the USA. The Reading Some owlets eye me from a scrub oak tree. They're fledged and glass me with their yellow eyes, and not a one will fly off in surprise, their wing tips rounded, flying silently, because I bear a gun, because I'm me. These are Bob Clawson's kids in Acton, Mass., and they are unpersuadable by Frost, their fathers absent and their bearings lost, and God excuses kids like these from class. What shall I say to owlets as I pass ? -from Mortal Stakes/Faint Thunder, Dakota Institute

A class I'll be teaching in February: Synergistic Visions

Even in Kyoto hearing the cuckoo's cry I long for Kyoto. - Basho

Another interview I did with Bob King of the CPC: CPC interview

A Tale This youth too long has heard the break Of waters in a land of change. He goes to see what suns can make From soil more indurate and strange. He cuts what holds his days together And shuts him in, as lock on lock: The arrowed vane announcing weather, The tripping racket of a clock; Seeking, I think, a light that waits Still as a lamp upon a shelf, -- A land with hills like rocky gates Where no sea leaps upon itself. But he will find that nothing dares To be enduring, save where, south Of hidden deserts, torn fire glares On beauty with a rusted mouth, -- Where something dreadful and another Look quietly upon each other.

This cold winter night, that old wooden-head buddha would make a nice fire.

Without wild places I would have little to say. - Peter Anderson ------- An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. - Frost ---------- Plato asserted that there is a realm of Forms or Ideas which exist apart from the one who may have thought of these ideas. Material things are then transient reflections or instantiations of unchanging ideas. Consequently, Plato considered that knowledge of material things is not really knowledge; real knowledge can only be had of unchanging ideas. Of Plato I draw no conclusions, but If indeed Idea and ideas or as old as the wind, they seem to move among us not just on the the back of the wind, but also on the soles of the feet, the tip of the tongue, the misplaced thing, and also in dream.

In Classical Greece the lucky find is a 'hermaione' which means a gift of Hermes. Of course the sudden loss -- of a thought, or a memory, or an object, is also attributed to Hermes. As well as the crossroads, the unknown, initiation, tricksterism, poetry, magic, alchemy, mercury, departure and passage.