quote

the answers are low sand hills
   compared to the Everest of the questions

-Wm. Alvarez

A Date With Death

A date with death
On the high Wyoming plateau
Premonition in dreams,
December when the ground lay bare
And sunlight shone golden
On vast windy rangelands,
North out of Rock Springs
Ominous snowclouds gather
Sioux death-rattles in the bottom of the mind-
The pickup out of gas
Many miles down some wrong turn
Off State Highway 39
Where the road ends
Under swaying cottonwoods

irony

All our acts of abbreviation
  [read:  cybernetics]
    only seem to amplify
      the flight of time

contrast

the engineer admires
     the Caterpillar skids through muddle
the poet admires
    the green frog swimming across its puddle

-Rush Creek

note

the artist resists orthodoxies
     without exception-
because?
all dogma represent
      a protocol of perception

'innovation'

For life is nothing
if not distinct particulars
like washing dishes,
   sweeping floors
      raking leaves
        et cetera
-all 'Zen' occasions for mindfulness-
to what end then
this resistless Cyber-push
to endlessly abbreviate things?

Mt Ritter

for Dan Sweigert

"...descending Mt Ritter
crossing those large snowfields
you have of course to select a course
       that won't kill
when you start glissading-
because SLIDE YOU WILL"

what emotional rivalries
  have at it
    when I let the phone
      just ring

damn those democrats!

The skinhead carpet-cleaner
Come this morning
To shampoo Mom's wall-to-wall
Sporting a ballcap stitched
With the triple tree of Calgaree
Offered us this opinion:
"The present crop of Democrats
Are on a mission to reduce the U.S. of A.
To a third-world country-
Why?   "so we'll Be All One"

wonder

While so much comes and goes
     in the blink of an eye
How to account for these fingers and toes
     that count year after year going by?

correction

when I told my Buddhist friend
"we're all on The Bubble"
he corrected me,
"no," he said, "we ARE The Bubble"