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...

You are what is female and you shall be called Eve. And what is masculine shall be called God. And from your name Eve we shall take the word Evil. And from God’s, the word Good. Now you understand patriarchal morality.        -- Judy Grahn I won't let the good men go unsung Good men throw their bodies on the lives of their mothers and their children and their wives and the unknown.  Good men don't die alone Each day this year, my soul has been punched and stunned by bullet-men ripping through the dance we do by bully-men raping girls or threatening to by barging-men pushing first through the doors of power while good men act as if nothing mattered more than to restore the faded elf to the christmas tree to greet you every morning with toast and tea to be the hand pressed in the hole the bullet tore I refuse to let the good men go unsung They are not many.  They are one and one and one ....   ...

All these years learning to verse,  learning to draw,  learning to live with my skin on, it dawns: there's something sublime  about the line.   In the beginning was the word,  the word  nobody heard, and only the shadow,  only the shadow  knows where the hell  the line goes. Perhaps It isn't where a line begins or where it ends, but whether it deems itself feigned or suddenly, strangely ordained. online punch line  dateline pipeline underline and  borderline bottom line  beeline,  shoreline,  timberline and waterline front line,  baseline,  byline fault line skyline,  waistline,  neckline hemline tagline,  hard line  deadline lifeline main line. Says Rudolf Arnheim, the line that describes the beautiful is elliptical.  It has simplicity ...

A review by Greg Hobbs of Belle Turnbulle's book, (Unsung Masters Series, Pleiades Press) appears in the current issue of High Country News. This is a book that my friend, David Rothman, fought hard to put into print.  A small bevy of us blurbed, reviewed, and sat on panels in order to bring Belle out of obscurity in the state and beyond.  Big thanks to Brian Calvert of High Country News for publishing it.  From Hobbs' review:  I like best the gems Turnbull sets within that narrow band of wetland seeps, wildflowers and pygym forest located just above timberline.  This is where 'ancient mysteries' govern above and beyond homesteaders, timber-cutters, and forest regulators.  In her world,  Magistrate and forester  Exist forlorn in those rude airs  Where dwell the ancient liberties. Greg Hobbs, High Country News San Miguel politician, poet, and old friend Art Goodtimes, shown here with Placerville's Rosemerry Wahtol...

The howl of the coyote is America's original national anthem.   - Dan Flores Coyote Call Love Calls Us to the Things of This World                            - Richard Wilbur The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul    Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple    As false dawn.                      Outside the open window    The morning air is all awash with angels.     Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,    Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.    Now they are rising together in calm swells    Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear    With the deep joy of their impersonal breat...