Ghost Buffalo

Charlemagne said,  To have another language is to possess a second soul.   I'm hopelessly monolingual, but I like to think I speak a little ravenese, coyote, quail, cat, and some kind of pidgin bluebirdese.    A poverty is said to bless the process. Lewis Hyde said that we are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved.  Three times I've spotted fox this spring.   One was with her two kits, and I spotted them down the hill.  The other two I noticed as they were gazing up at me from the ravine.   Rather feline, the fox.   Anyone can speak Troll.  All you have to do is point and grunt. -- JK Rowling Still no mountain lion.  Not even tracks.  But every now and then, I sense that one has been in the area.   Only in the last moment of human history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.   -- E.O. Wilson

Happy to have played a small part in this worthy project:  "Well-known during her life but long out of print,Turnbull’s lyrics of sublime alpine wilderness and her narratives about the harsh and dangerous world of hard rock mining offer us a profoundly original vision of the American west that transcends the region. "In poems that are as consoling as they are unsettling, Belle Turnbull extracted and refined the meanings of mountains, miners, memory, and mortality. Now, nearly fifty years after her death, a team of gifted writers—serving as Turnbull’s latter-day friends in high places—joins together to rescue her work from our inattention, and return us to her company. “ With essays by Dave Rothman, Dave Mason, Uche Ogbuji, Susan Spears, and others Belle Turnbull e

Not just a beautiful piece of music, operatic in scale, but a profoundly well made epic poem.   I include the lyrics below, which stand alone as a piece of historical literature.  I mean to write an essay on this, as a song, and as a stand-alone poem, and make a plea that it be known in the world of letters.  And in the schools.  It deserves a place in the American canon.   The death dirge alone is enough to have convinced me of this. An unsung genius, this man, and the song is virtually unknown.  With thanks to my brother, for turning me on to it when I was a child, and to Chrissy, and Dave, whose travels, conversation, and poems, have put Wounded Knee back into my orbit of thought.   Turn up the volume.  You'll weep.  You'll dance.  You'll fall to your knees.   I think it's time, great white father,  that you knew my name.   Jd Blackfoot The Song Of Crazy Horse  The Song of Crazy Horse Words & Music by: J D Blackfoot © 1973 Published by: Tokala

It appears my work has been selected for inclusion in Nasty Women Poets, an Anthology , due out in the fall from Lost Horse Press.  (They'll be reprinting one of the older poems from Poetry Mag).   My mother will be so proud. A couple of new poems will also appear in The Hopkins Review , Summer Issue.  Meanwhile, closer to home, one of the galleries where my work is featured on Main Street in Junque Towne, has gone belly up.   Tough times all round in the valley.  And a Denver mogul is buying up little Palisade's historic buildings, kicking the local merchants and artists out on their Palisade ears.  One wonders if he rubs his hands together while doing this.   All politics is loco.  

Our boy will be graduating from The School of Mines in a couple of weeks.  A couple of weeks after that he ships off to Houston, where he'll begin his career as an engineer.  It should be noted that Houston is a good deal further from home than Golden was.   I suppose I have been in a state of denial about this fact.     What is life but a series of adjustments... Fare Thee Well       for Samuel Stay clear of Lake Superior,  go light in the Sea of Fears,  be still as a hint at Rushing Creek  and long in the Zaire.  Behold the gold at Crater Lake,  be hushed at Puget Sound,  go crooked through the Bering Strait where all the sails fall down—  and should the falcon come to you  with ribbons in her beak, then don’t forget to count the trees and all the sounds and all the seas that you have known, before you fall asleep.