Ghost Buffalo

When Your Nest When your nest runneth over and your child’s broke a bone tumbling down the slope and the other child grows in patience and in sympathy we don’t believe in love; we don’t believe, we know.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid .

. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a metaphor as: “A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison” They give as an example Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage.” Clearly all the world is not a stage but Shakespeare had the line delivered from a stage and compared the people of the world to actors playing their parts. It was more than a century before Shakespeare that the word metaphor came into English and it did so in a most appropriate document. The year was 1477 and the document something called The Ordinall of Alchimy by one Thomas Norton. This is actually a kind of poem about the secrets of alchemy and the reason that the subject of alchemy is so appropriate for the word metaphor is that writings on alchemy written by alchemists had always been as obscure as possible and used piles of metaphor in favour of straightforward explanations on how to turn lead into gold. The aut...

...Or let my lamp at midnight hour be seen in some high lonely tower where I may oft outwatch the Bear with Thrice-Great Hermes or unsphere the spirit of Plato, to unfold what worlds, or what vast regions hold the immortal Mind that hath forsook her mansion in this fleshy nook.

O Egypt, Egypt —so the great lament Of thrice-great Hermes went— Nothing of thy religion shall remain Save fables, which thy children shall disdain. His grieving eye foresaw The world’s bright fabric overthrown Which married star to stone And charged all things with awe. And what, in that dismantled world, could be More fabulous than he? Had he existed? Was he but a name Tacked on to forgeries which pressed the claim Of every ancient quack— That one could from a smoky cell By talisman or spell Coerce the Zodiac? Still, still we summon him at midnight hour To Milton’s pensive tower, And hear him tell again how, then and now, Creation is a house of mirrors, how Each herb that sips the dew Dazzles the eye with many small Reflections of the All— Which, after all, is true.

Thine, O priest of Egypt, lately Found I in the vast, Weed-encumbered sombre, stately, Grave-yard of the Past; And a presence moved before me On that gloomy shore, As a waft of wind, that o'er me Breathed, and was no more.

. For My Contemporaries How time reverses The proud in heart! I now make verses Who aimed at art. But I sleep well. Ambitious boys Whose big lines swell With spiritual noise, Despise me not! And be not queasy To praise somewhat: Verse is not easy. But rage who will. Time that procured me Good sense and skill Of madness cured me.