Ghost Buffalo

The husband and his buddy disking on their lunch hour.  

Chance, and chance alone, has meaning.  -- Kundera ----- The Trickster myth derives creative intelligence from appetite.    It begins with a being whose main concern is getting fed, and it ends with that same being grown mentally swift, adept at creating and unmasking deceit, proficient at hiding his or her tracks, and at seeing through the devices used by others to hide theirs.      -- Lewis Hyde My gratitude to Kent for this montage:   And to Art, for this nod: The Telluride Watch/Trickster Ridge

I was sorry to hear of his passing.  He wasn't just a billionaire humanitarian, supporting the arts on a large scale and from a great height.  He was also a man who wrote lengthy, remarkably clever fan letters to obscure poets like myself.  By snail mail, no less.  On the most beautiful paper I've ever seen.  This was a few years ago.  I remember googling his name to discover who on earth he could be.  I remember following the public trail of an eccentric, private mind, and marveling.  A couple of years ago his daughter, Julia, directed a PBS documentary about him.  Well worth seeing.  If I can locate it online, I'll link to it. He'd seen my work in The New Criterion, and reached out on a whim.  To the whim, and the whirl, and the ripples left behind.  Good night, strange prince. William Louis Dreyfus Dies

Where have I been. One could say I have been plagued by ideas.  And limited by time, talent, ambition, discipline, etc. Meanwhile, by the by, nevertheless, the passage of time and all that.  Since moving in, spring of last year, we’ve removed about ten tons of gravel and  large swathes of weed-resistant fabric from the land beneath our feet.  Thus began my studies in physical exertion.  And its attendant physical agony.  I am old, Fodder William,   and I am xeriscaping upside down, on a steep hill.     Got me a burn permit, yup, and set fire to the north side of the ravine.   My daughter often stops over for those burn days, and we get to share the weird exhilaration.  Only once did we lose control of our controlled burn.  The couple of horses next door stand absolutely still, heads high, tails up, during a burn.  I have arrived in the sticks, and the sticks are sublime. I have arrived in the sticks and the sticks have stuck me ?  I am steeped in the sticks and stuck o