Goat

The honor of the goat is that it has a rite of of sin bearer named for it, not to speak of Esau who was to be a wild donkey man, or Balaam's ass. There is a dignity to these beings that have natures which we know and about whom whole species of thought occur. Consider Balaam here, and goat here, also a species of Thought Goat, and if you like, Thought Ass, a species of writing, called ThoughtGoatten, part of the greater bestiary in which we occur. Thought Beasts as well. Pegasus would be included among these except it is mythological, a charge sometimes applied to Balaam. Whether this commentary, fiction or poem is real is more or less the same to me.

   Michael Broyles makes the telling observation that "much of the story [of Pilgrim's Progress] is set in America...it was the metaphorical terrain the believer had to traverse...," which he says to differentiate the gentler Puritan composer William Billings (The New England Psalm Singer, 1770. Also see Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, 25). A great deal more than this has been said of those first  centuries. Uncontaminated nature means uncontaminated by mind not land fills. The Puritans transferred sin from themselves to the forest to drive it out, except their goat was the tree.  The sin bearer was the forest. It had to be mowed lest sins come back. A scapegoat is no good unless lost.  Anyway, trees hid predators. The tree became the goat and was cut. The forest then could not hide the terror of the dark.  This thinking unfurled all American botanical and biological extinction.

Puritans thought "the world," would contaminate. It was  toxic austere soil New England garrisoned  against the natural. New England only welcomed the Pennsylvania genius of inviting nature indoors two centuries too late.  By 1850 transcendentalism had them all wishing  for the pond. Early New England believed that savage men, wild men and their own sins  at the clearing's edge were only kept at bay by cutting back the growth. Defoliate the  forest, clear cut, exterminate. This prevented sin and made a profit. Against the evil in themselves they built a dominion for their superior race. In the new puritan age today, a "spiritual imagination... impotent, sterile, or dead... an era of violence, chaos, destruction, madness, and slaughter (Thomas Merton, Seeking Paradise, 85).

Raze and Exterminate also lay down with Romulus and Remus at the Puritan door. Questions of these sucklings by the Pennsylvania Dutch, who survived the murderous Roman ancestor-adversaries in Holland and Switzerland, are opposite. They domesticated the natural, invited it indoors, befriended it in their natures and painted it, sculpted it and threw it on the forge. Pennsylvania didn’t make any Scarlet Letter, or Cask of Amontillado, it decorated barns and chests. Decorated chests may be expanded in the real or in the parable of the inner decoration, both good, the dower chest and the entire Way Into the Flowering Heart, and evil, the many-vagaried Orc.

Sources:

1. The Tree Became A Goat - People in the Wilderness 

2. Apologizing for Art in the Americanization of the Pennsylvania Dutch

She Has Brooded Since 2009

Faisal

To get these kings you have to get the attitude. Faisal is undergoing his beauty treatment in pride. So the British have warmed their royals. The word king hardly appears. It's all babies and beauties, stability you know, masks. Other potentates suffer their pride. There's nothing behind a Saudi prince. Abdulla, Farouk, Faisal, especially Farouk lands fat cats in trouble. Outlaws in bandanas with the top down will pull up next to him and mock his cousins at stoplights,  taunt: King Farouk! King Farouk!

In faux history catastrophe is the electric arc that raises moats, aureoles, craters, concentric scarrings and blisters overwritten by the scarping of scallops. This is not a sea food dinner. I won the blue ribbon in sixth grade for the entire school for a pic of characters on a stage off set by scallop markings. Whether electric or fire pits collapse to caverns below, if you mix con5 clay with cone 10, or set parallel strings of cratered mounds, planetary wide scaring, hemispheric discharges, dendritic patterns, sinuous channels, like erosion but not, concatenation of coronal streamers chain the alcoves, pseudo tributaries of  lava tubes make a fractured terrain. Who doesn't seek the geological cup of complex terracings, a bullseye crater in ionized hexagons, Lichtenberg figures that trap negative charge of plasma spiral trails joggled over razor backs? That's our Faisal too.

 Many of these did fall, implode, collapse in the stretching intended to enhance their lines. Why were they pushed to such extremes? Some are blind. Some can't raise their hands because they don't have arms or just stumps for arms in these days. Those who raise hands may not all get them all the way up from the weight or maybe they are prevented. There are all kinds of postures in hands raised, just like there are all kinds of reasons for raising them. Surrender is implied, and praise. Also sacrifice. Those without hands are the most poignant if we imagine we can see the heads and the bodies, as if the arms and hands were wrapped as if they were armed and militarized security forces get them ambiguous, concealing something under their cloaks. Beating hearts. Some of these may be considered Protest Jars silently witnessing. These ideas, called minimalist and abstract expressionist, arise in conversation like Legends of the Unconscious, not yet written exactly, with many sources of vacancy and presence, vacancy of the design and designer, presence of the flows of the natural. But making and repeating patterns to identify work as recognizable of a certain style  is a betrayal of vacancy. Making by erosion, breakage, eruption, gravity, is vacancy. The world is before us, but the pot remains after. Ask what he will do tomorrow if he had success today. The answer is there is no time and what is done is done before, during and after.

Lamination arches from form, bowed in the firing, so daylight appears between its cracks, caverns and splits in the firing, The eye tries to understand what it sees when folds and curves make shadow. It constantly plays over it to create familiarity. It is as if he eye recasts the image, which seems to be moving, to understand it. This establishes the statement, it depends on your point of view.

Such composition has a range of meaning and association, from more simple but improbable Flowers from Rock to curvilinear figures not quite named, like a woman a flower or abstract. The eye tries to make these deconstructions of a vessel look like something it recognizes, stressed and broken attempts to fall and stand at the same time, pots as people go against all odds and heroically oppose, or bow the head, the knee, and excite sympathy.

Pegasus

The islands off the Aleutian coast are home to Pegasus.

where baby Aleutians in childhood range.

Many are sighted  at birth before they fly away.

Then you see them. But later their colors reflect the ice.

Arctic blues, whites, beige, frost colors make them hard to see

against the clouds, which is why they are myth at first.

Whether such flying horses are real who can doubt?

These are modeled from my years among them.  

Babies emerge head first with mane trailing down the back,

body submerged in the mother. The baby’s wings are furled

and it looks as though the mother’s head has disappeared.

This confusion of bodies, wings and tails continues to the legs

which are fragile, spindly like the rockers of a horse.

The front legs are open and the back legs funnel to a v.

The body out of which the baby comes looks rather like flower by this time,

the head of the young sticking up as though emerging.

Actually it flies out of the mother on its own at this stage.

Striations of  white, pale beige, faded violet, maroon

wash ever pale with a head dress of all white,

useful for reflection when flying near the sun.  

The wings of the mother  are spread as the baby’s are not,

so it looks like it is in process of glide,

legs separated as if about to race forward.

They are always born as twins, fraternal we should say,

or maybe the difference is from the birth order born some days apart.

The Pegasus twin has heavier feet, less mane and its mouth is open

as in full cry at being second or because it is born in song,

for the horses sing as they fly.

One’s wings edge ivory though the usual sky,

colors with a sense of paint, subtle pastels.

The second baby is often born less emerged from the body,

due to different times of its maturity. In addition to the face plate

it has a body wrap as if coming undone, more spectacular

than its brother. Both are male according to custom,

but parts of the island where females birth are guarded by the adults.

There’s no point denying that many people think them birds,

they have wings after all, and they fly,

which stems from a lack of imagination among primitives.

On  islands where they live Pegasusians are more like we see spaceships

Who have only assayed the appearance of the babe.

Adults are larger than we would think which adds to the riddle

of how they can fly like some presidential jet dwarfs planes.

To compare them to planes it’s a good idea

To imagine the texting produced by seeing one pass

as you recline and look. It leaves open the question

as to where they are going, but they might ask the same of us.

The answer, to Jakarta, is as meaningful as if they say Andulusia.

To understand that better, we fly to real places so called, they fly mythological.

Blame Darwin for separation of fact from myth,

it has not been so long that myth was  fact.

Then people lived on ground in huts, died young, saw stars and lived in storm.

We posit such life produces more myth than ours.

Living indoors among light produces fact.

Facts however are brutes while myth forgives.

We should send anthropologists back to advise on the merits.

Of course this was done. Many went native and never returned.

They rode the backs of Pegasus past the astonished airbus.

One thing it shows is how short the age of fact became,

since we, having left it, have entered the new age of make believe.

If it seems three ages appear, perhaps in a fourth age yet unknown

the ages of the Greeks come full and a lot of foolish things in poems

bear out in fact and we end up quoting them.

Meanwhile  horses flying past airplanes invisibly because the screens are down

and nobody looking out thinks ufos and contact alien races but deny the horse.

Does that seem awkward or backward?

That they are a flying breed of horse  would not be believed by a race such as ours

who at one time did not believe a bird could fly, despite reports.

 

Baby Pegasus Flying horse island.

Coyote Song

Once a time in fairy tale
a dog would save the pekldfille.
Man he was all loving the pep0le.
Oh he went up and down saving the peoopel.
In alleys, down basements, protect,
pertect, peertect du peoplez."

But I don't like da doggie.

Ya-honk.

Do not compare me to doggie.

Pit Pony

Pit Pony

Pit pony blind in Britain,

got rights in Europe with Ape,

registered to vote in condos

cases were pending in Spain.
  Kafka's animals understood
the citizen of Giant Mole
obsessed about it like a dog,
the thing that’s not,
the mole that’s not,
the mind that's not,
the ice foe's not,
dots comprehending
to the end
of Pit Ponies
deep in this belief
showed Kafka's animals
were men.