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Spring Comes Round
The Kid spun.
Her arms stretched wide to the warming air.
The tips of her tennis shoes ground in the grit.
Rock liked the feel of them,
the circles they made in him
and the circle she made, staggering now,
Coyote bounding alongside.
Coyote's tongue lolled.
Perhaps he was as dizzy as the Kid
or it might be his dry equivalent of a laugh.
I heard you having fun! Jackrabbit called,
leaping from behind a prickly pear.
Another spin and another
and they fell into a tangle of tails
and ears and hair and fur and dusty laughter.
Rock, who never stopped spinning
as he moved through day and night,
hadn't needed to join in. There was no reason to feel wistful.
Still, as his friends wriggled and thrashed against him,
trying to stand and falling back on top of Rock and each other,
laughing and trying to stand again,
he looked out at the day, and he was glad.
—Sarah Webb
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1)
Cones & circles do not need bracing.
They do not collapse when shaken.
Squares tempt those in a hurry
to remove the diagonal bracing that
keeps the garage beneath
from disappearing when
the ground moves when
rocks relax their grip on
their kindred moving
in the opposite direction.
Still those rocks are riven,
one from another by swirls in
the sphere of our home planet.
Even circles have currents that
wind smoke through the roof,
tear ships, bow from stern,
and that greatest of winds, either
regional or intensely local,
flattens houses both square
and round, destroying
their symmetries.
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| (Photo by Otto Greule Jr /Getty Images) |
2)
The heyoka are the holy fools
of the Lakota, doing things backward
to show how forward is
equally arbitrary, questioning
the status quo by
satire, acting
as the counter weight.
Counter weight
to an entire nation requires
extreme contrariness, so awkward,
such a great weight to carry
the Shadow of
an entire nation.
Who plays heyoka
for our nation?
3)
The loud, the vulgar shout from
the podium exaggerating the voice
of those who are not heard, do not count.
No wonder he is so loud, so vulgar,
speaking for the millions whose
voice is not heard, whose jobs, identity, life
has been given to machines,
ground to nothing in productivity gains,
til the machines themselves complain,
the very rocks cry out, telling what
few humans are left to say.
—Jeff Taylor
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| Circles with an Opening by Kim Mosley |
Boo circles! Yea mists!
Here’s what I don’t like about circles. I’m either in or out. If I’m in, I can’t get out. And if I’m out, I can’t get in. Either way, I am restricted. Even when we set chairs in a circle we need to leave an opening.
I like circles better than other geometric shapes. They all have their problems. I like cars that look like square boxes. The boxier the better.
The other problem with circles is that they roll down hills. They don’t sit anywhere. They just lay down. Our world, as angular as it is, isn’t very friendly towards circles.
Did you know that the lenses on a camera sees circles? But since art is rectangles for the most part, what you get when you take a picture is either a landscape or a portrait, all cut by your helpful camera from a circle.
There is talk of a new camera that would give you only circles. And then, if you need to cow down to rectangle loving people, you can give them portraits or landscapes to their heart’s content.
So what is it that I like? Mists. Mists neither include nor exclude. They are both here and there. There is no beginning and no end. No one can take my mist because they can’t grab hold of her. We are all mists. Nothing more and nothing less. Our edges are soft. Some molecules bouncing off of me might be on the other side of the world, and some on this side. If someone says, where do you live, I can just say here or over there, and I’d be right. No need for GPS... Because I am always in the mist, wherever I am. Want to join households? It already happened. All mists are one.
I do owe a lot to circles. Zero is supposed to be a great mathematical advancement. How else would I indicate how many children I have living at home when they both grow up and leave home?
In school, I used to dread “0s.” 50% was bad enough, but if I knew nothing and wasn’t wise enough to know that was cool, I’d be devastated with a “0.”
Back to mists... They are much closer to what I know about something. There is nothing solid, nothing unchanging, nothing resolute about a mist. They are like feelings. They have some focus, but they don’t give up there as does a circle. Sometimes they are very contained and sometimes they explode. But they always respond to atmospheric conditions and changing life situations.
Circles on the other hand are like pies... And my problem with a pie is that once I eat it, it is gone. Gone with the wind, except not really... Gone into my stomach. Mists might be “gone with the wind,” but there is always a piece left behind... A memory... A glimpse at what once was.
Boo circles! Yea mists!
—Kim Mosley
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