beetles

   Toward the end of his life someone asked Darwin, "after spending a lifetime studying the works of Creation, what can we now infer about the mind of God...?"
The great naturalist pondered the question a moment and answered, "Well he's awfully fond of beetles!"

(400,000 species)

just curious

any truth to the rumour that the USA traded T.S.Eliot to England for Bob Hope?

texas

barefoot
I was born-
barefoot I remain

subjectivity

Easy to mistake
Our own projections of time & space
For transcendence;
              what smalls us--
But as Emerson reminds,
"It is the eye that makes the horizon"

haiku two

frozen blackbird
   dead by the tracks
      catching fine blown snow

-north dakota

zig-zag

Instead of insisting
On the narrow Zig-
Why not invite
The wayward Zag?

pigeons

What does it say
  about a man

whose spirit soars
  on the flight of citypark pigeons
       
by the dozen

swinging across sycamores
into March sunlight?

Money

    Money, too, dreams of love.  It’s tired of being crumpled in our pockets, insulted and maligned, blamed for everything that’s wrong.  Money didn’t ask us to run up all these debts, thinking money would save us.  Money knows nothing will save us.

                            -Sy Safransky

true poetry

   "...true poetry is what does not pretend to be poetry.  It is in the dogged drafts of a few maniacs seeking the new encounter."


-Francis Ponge

you want... concretehood?

Dodge & weave
     all you can
But vulnerable's your fate
    Mr Everyman

handyman

sublime
working alone
at the Ring of Bone  


to gong so slow
the ancient

bronze

densho

like any reckless tramp

            “...every storm has something fine to show you.” -Muir

Trudging through hip-deep snow
along the Truckee River
showered with blowing snowdust
from the close pines
I stopped to catch my breath
and glimpse a winter half-moon
    between swirling snowclouds--
what exhiliration I felt
in that chance moment,     like
    any reckless tramp
bogged down in the middle of nowhere,
snow in my boots, the going rough:
out on the edge that is everywhere,
out in the cold waver of pink twilights,
baptised by ice, the elemental shakedown
the world builds itself against--
the adventurer lives for that edge,
seeks it, walks it, courts it,
where all roads end, trails end, time ends,
the blue glimmer of the forever beyond
he finds irresistible,
forsakes for it all other loves,
Where he is lost again
he finds his life....

von trappe

The cybernetic “revolution”
Is really just an extension
Of a long-standing tendency in the West-
To keep the mind bright, restless & strident,
Abuzz with prospect & production.
For the ocean depths it has traded a sleek gigabyte surfboard...

Regarding Time

"...we are taught from childhood to regard absolute Newtonian time- that is, the steady, observable ticking of the kitchen clock- as the single valid measuring stick for all things in the world.  The shrew is quick, we say, whereas the grizzly bear is ponderous.  However, each of those animals is living at the appropriate pace of its own biological clock-- and the result, living quickly for two years or ponderously for thirty-one years, is in the end the same."

-Charles Panati

lines from Thurber

"...it is better to have asked some of the questions than to know all of the answers."  

"...there is no safety in numbers-- or in anything else." 


-Thurber

Geo. Bernard Shaw last wish

"...please, no religious service and my tombstone is not to take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice."

haiku

after Megan's party
   the donkey tacked to the door
      has ten tails

Spring

Smote
by float

Of semi-
      cumuli:

Gift of eyes
Wed to blue March
             skies

Otherness

Sexy
is all this rumination
on transcendence,
on what holds everything
together--

But these hours
I'd rather the vast extent
of otherness,
the deep & unknowable
salt shaker