If a person sings quietly to himself on the street people smile with approval; but if he talks it's not alright; they think he's crazy. The singer is presumed to be happy and the talker unhappy.

There often seems to be a playfulness to wise people, as if either their equanimity has as its source this playfulness or the playfulness flows from equanimity; and they can persuade other people who are in a state of agitation to calm down and smile.

If a person sings quietly to himself on the street people smile with approval; but if he talks it's not alright; they think he's crazy. The singer is presumed to be happy and the talker unhappy.

There aren't many irritations to match the condescension which a woman metes out to a man who she believes has loved her vainly for the past umpteen years.

Country people tend to consider that they have a corner on righteousness and to distrust most manifestations of cleverness, while people in the city are leery of righteousness but ascribe to themselves all manner of cleverness.

Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.

Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?