Sue, the horse stanza is meant to evoke two "realities."  First, the West 
Nile virus is adversely impacting horses as it is songbirds.  Second, when I 
was a wee lad, there were predictions horses would become extinct because 
they no longer had any use.

I do agree about clown and have changed that stanza so that the poem now 
reads

Memories of an Old Chinese Proverb

*At the start of Korea’s confict,
General MacArthur
issued no winter clothing
because the war would be over by summer.*

Starlings trill their simple summer tune
as songbirds avalanche
from cobalt-flavored skies –
blue,
scarlet,
brown,
oriole orange
and gray.

There are no horses in California,
only barrel racers
whose make-up drips on faded tickets
to a show that opens before it closes.

*The number of cases of “that old TB”
is on the rise, perhaps in conjunction with
the heterosexual disease Aids or*

because the ice at Barrow melts earlier each year.

An otter mother wraps her child
in kelp
before she dives Kachemak Bay
for another fisherman’s catch.

Does she miss Prince William Sound
and the cry of sea urchins
beneath Columbia Glacier’s bergs?

Spruce beetles march
down the Tanana, Peace and Laird
to discover
how much they like white pine and popular.

*The survival rate for meningitis
is less today
than when a serum was developed
the beginning of the last century.*

I hear the ring neck call the morning sun
and the sound of frost
as a saw whines cutting winter’s wood .

In a cave in Kenya,
an ancient
life-form waits its turn on the wheel

as I brew a second pot of coffee

and forget the pictogram
for dawn.


*

Thanks.

Gary





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