Wendy Videlock

It's often those who talk a streak on world affairs and love and peace who seem to love and peace the least.

has a moth in her palm, a river on her tongue, a scalpel in her boat, a lump in her throat, a gamble in her shoe, a fire in her den, a shadow in her flesh, a flutter in her breast, like everybody else.

It was the blind girl from the rez who stole the baker’s missing bread; it was the guitar playing fool who crooned and raced the wild mustangs through our heads. It was the village idiot who played his chess without the fool, the bowl of soup who said too late, too late, too late to blame the thread, the spoon, the text, the mole.

Don’t get me wrong: I know that knowledge is power, that mystery’s water, that hunger makes a gargantuan lover, and yes, I’ve drunk of the river Lethe, from the breath of the Celts, from the echo of the bugling elk, and yet, alas, here I be, small and twee, all liquored up on song and love, hard as rails and light as air, expecting the heavens to throw down a flare, to send in the clowns, to burn a bush, strike up the sea, anything that might mean those cloudy bastards have noticed me.

There's nothing more erotic than one      red Chilean plum slumbered in the brown palm of the curved hand of the right man.

I’ve a friend in possession of a philosophic spin; if should I speak of art, theology, the universe, or whim, he thinks I speak of him. This enduring tic, indicative of universal spins, theology, art and whim, nonetheless makes conversation grim.

One teeny tiny worm making the earth turn.

It’s always darkest before the leopard’s kiss. Where there’s smoke there is emphasis. A bird in the hand is bound for the stove. The pen is no mightier than the soul. Never underestimate the nib of corruption. Better late than suffer the long introduction. All work and no play is the way of  the sloth. If  you can dream it bring the child the moth. He is not wise that parrots the wise. All that glitters has been revised. An idle mind is a sign of  the time. The less things change the more we doubt design.

Beneath her nest, a shrew's head, a finch's beak and the bones of a quail attest the owl devours the hour, and disregards the rest.

Big Jack and his walking stick live on the ridge. Navajo orphan kids dance for him, bobcat urine’s in the weeds, the shotgun barrel's up his sleeve, a Persian coin is on the wind. The Chinese Mountains smell the moon and arch their backs. I tell him, Jack, there’s times I wish I was living in canvas France, the old west, a picture book, the Sea of Tranquility, or even in the den near the hot spring. He says, kid, to hell with phantom limbs; spring is a verb, a wish is a wash, a walking stick is a gottdam wing.