From The New Lexicon Webster's Enclopedic Dictionary of the English Language

Maverick: (1) A person who refuses to conform and acts independently // (2) a member of a political party who will not tow the party line // (3) an unbranded animal on the range­­


In lineage of poets who have taught me the craft of word, The Saint of Fresno told a Fish by the sea:

"For me the finest poems are those that continue trying to locate and echo the mystery or mysteries that resonate most profoundly throughout our lives; you know, sex and death, love and faith. And poets have to do that with the most awkward of artistic tools--language.

This being said, and I awkwardly flapping my maw, Maverick verse is on that thin thread of Tantra between the sun and the moon--the sacred and the profane and the profanely sacred. Already I have gone past any word that would explain the balance of being, to define these great expanses of life and humanness as those great explores of the earth and the mind.
This sense of exploration combined with the constructions of 1. One is an unbranded animal and 2. We must hunt what drives us most, and in poetry these desires become wholly enlightening consuming of all things--and does not return.
But it is rumored that while smoking, Dubie taking a Tibetan Buddhist empowerment wished to make an offering that had been touched by all the elements. Smoke journeyed to the Mission outside of Tucson to purchase a basket for that offering. Chatting with a Ottam Franciscan Brother, and Historian for the tribe, related transcripts that stated that after Victorio Fired his last shot into the face of an advancing Lieutenant of Jaquine Terrazas at Tres Castillios, He Stood and said a prayer to Usen and let his wind free. Terrazas stated in his log that his head scout an Opata, understood the whisperings of Victorio's prayer as:
Fight­­
Then let your wind free my brothers, for if they catch you with your breath you will live the rest of your breath like their penned and pastured animals.
--These are Wise Words--

One does not have to subscribe to the Idea of INDE being of the people who are already dead. In the county of over 2000 square miles, this great Irish state of Kinnels­ Of the Dog Men and a great sage to us animals. But no Bear is he, simply pulling the skin of my brother around him. Though this is no small task. It is for this reason that perhaps the Maverick poet sees Galway as our Great Cousin. But Dogs though honorable they be domesticated in the celebration of the word, personality, and death.
Here is where the family line diverges­­though I believe a man of 2000 square miles to be on a different approach to the same "place of truth in being in poetry" though the death of the self though knowable indeed cannot be done in a safe place. To take the short path of a Maverick Poet is to precariously place the ego and the form on the edge of the earth, stare out into the great canyon lit in the blood of Ochre and gold, knowing that where the persona stands in the windy sun is the center of the earth.
Yes Brother, the center can be scary when you're on the edge and the wind blows. Do you play the rectum sucking ballet of tensing­ curling your toes in your boots? You sense the wind around you. Till you weaken, your knees buckle to prostrate your forearms along the slab filled with creatures like you who gazed into the light of the Great Black Mother, but unlike you gazed too long before they touched their tongues and their mats to her sandy breasts and were themselves turned to stone. No action is the true Medusa of Artists all around.
As I was told, the first Apache was born to Changing Woman with the Wind and the Thunder as Midwifes. Just as he passed into this world in the cal, his mother noticed he had black eyes­­
Or that is what I remember.

Then she said something like:

For Black Son, He before who I knelt
Before, repeatedly, I have just given birth to a man like those
who were formerly on this earth­­
and then broke the poke.

This is how I remember it.

But is this the way we approach the death of the self in poetry? By Shouting, weeping, lucky that the panic in heart brought you to your sense and knees­­to observe the canyon and the cliffs safely?

In the language of my mothers mother Dadawoosh has two meanings: To shout, and to orgasm, to cry life. The Great Gedün Chöpel says good things about the subject:

The necklace of the early clouds of hope and doubt diminish at midnight.
Melt the moon of the self-arisen basic constituent
into milk.
Give young ladies the great spacious bliss
clear and nonconceptual.

And further the great samurai/monk/poet Musagi goes on to speak of existing within this bilateral tension:

A body is given life from the mist of nothingness.
Existing where there is nothing is the meaning of the phrase form is emptiness.
That all things are provided for by nothingness is the meaning of the phrase emptiness is form.
One should not think these are two separate things.

This is what Smoking French Cliffs Speak of in the first stanza of The Genesis Text:

I am surely dead, along with David, Phil, Sam, Marvin and surely we al stand in a secession of etceteras
that is

The Hagakure--A Genesis text for Larry Levis who died alone,

Both of these writings are the feat of poetic Ronin, Mavericks, and they are the same moment that defines us within this profundity of shadow and form.

Clarity comes with the sense that all things are one; to fall within the canyon is to become it. I believe it is this keen duality of one that allows people to shift into a higher octave where a man or woman becomes the animal spirit guide­­the aspect of Mind­­in the Buddhist sense that bonds with the ego charging the person with expounding the embodiment of perfection they represent. Though I have no personal experience, I believe this is why the Diné, not to mention the Apache and the Celtics fear the skin walkers among us and not the bear or the wolf or fox. Our own Hu­­Manness is what destroys our own coporral nature in absolute. I believe that holding in tension this duality is the cautious failure of both poets and shape shifters, Metaphorically speaking­­To surrender the instinct of truth in being for desire of the sense. But what do I know of these things.

I can only tell you that I have heard that to challenge the very rock ribs of form and language, to devour the sky. This is Maverick Poetry.

I have also heard to beware a man who enters the camp of his enemy--and bears no weapon.

--These are also wise words.--


Copyright © Henry Oso Quintero , 2001.  All Rights Reserved.