Ghost Buffalo

Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges by Wallace Stevens Ursula, in a garden, found A bed of radishes. She kneeled upon the ground With flowers around, Blue, gold, pink, and green. She dressed in red and gold brocade And in the grass an offering made of radishes and flowers. What I love about Le Guin is that she contained multitudes, with focus.  One minute she could say something like this: Adults seek moral guidance and intellectual challenge in stories about warrior monkeys, one-eyed giants, and crazy knights who fight windmills.  Literacy is considered a beginning, not an end. ....Well, maybe in some other country  but not in this one.  In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order.  Poetry and plays have no relation to practical politics.  Novels are for students, housewives, and other people who don't work. Fantasy is for children...

He wasn't one day and then he was and he looked at the world’s inscrutable face and wondered what a body does in this inscrutable place. What is your pleasure? he asked the enclosure where the squirrels faced off with the birds; but in meadow or stable, no creature was able  to answer in human words,  yes, none answered in human words.   Chris Childers, (Dark Horse, Winter 2017) I continue to agonize over a cento on the subject of walls.  This is one of those conceptual projects to which I'm stubbornly attached.  I've got the guts of it, the brick and mortar, so to speak, but can't seem to weave the lines together because, well... brick and mortar obviously don't weave.   At any rate, I've observed that the more I try to write about walls the more I write of fog, stone, sky, and river.   And of course critter.  Even my promising little ditty on Exhibitionism and the Overexposed...