When Making An Axe Handle The Pattern

With No Surroundings There Can Be No Path, And With No Path One Cannot Become Free.

Lay Down These Words Before Your Mind Like Rocks. Placed Solid, By Hands In Choice Of Place, Set Before The Body Of The Mind In Space And Time: Solidity Of Bark, Leaf, Or Wall Riprap Of Things: Cobble Of Milky Way. Straying Planets, These Poems, People, Lost Ponies With Dragging Saddles -- And Rocky Sure-foot Trails. The Worlds Like An Endless Four-dimensional Game Of Go. Ants And Pebbles In The Thin Loam, Each Rock A Word A Creek-washed Stone Granite: Ingrained With Torment Of Fire And Weight Crystal And Sediment Linked Hot All Change, In Thoughts, As Well As Things.

I Never Find Words Right Away. Poems For Me Always Begin With Images And Rhythms, Shapes, Feelings, Forms, Dances In The Back Of My Mind.

Burning The Small Dead Branches Broke From Beneath Thick Spreading Whitebark Pine. A Hundred Summers Snowmelt Rock And Air Hiss In A Twisted Bough.

In The 40,000 Year Time Scale We're All The Same People. We're All Equally Primitive, Give Or Take Two Or Three Thousand Years Here Or A Hundred Years There.