Ghosts, Ashes, Fly Away

everything, and he had the ability to bring disparate things together— metamorphical thinking—to make sense of the sometimes baffling lives that we all live. Jim was the exact opposite of the school superintendent I heard about who had three or four masters degrees, an Ed.D. and a Ph.D. When the school board fired him, a citizen inquired of the board chairman, "How could you fire such a well-educated feller?" The chairman replied, "He was educated way beyond his intelligence." Jim Wayne Miller was educated way past the degrees he had earned. And he used all of what he had learned to make art. He was truly a sentient and a thinking man. (With thanks to Mary Ellen Miller and Joyce Dyer for helping to assemble material for this talk.) Ghosts, Ashes, Fly Away What happened today? Dawn's pink spill was blotted across the world's edge. A vast black crowd of starlings funneled itself relentlessly against the grain of the marbled sky. Even so, on the cusp of winter, I caught the distant scent of spring. —David E. Poston 25 ...