I really do not wish to ascribe to the future. For the better part of the last forty years, and including this week, I have been working with horses. I found the horses and they found me, sort of like Andre Segovia being discovered by the guitar, all the magic and the music just waiting to be released forever.

My direction is cherishing the past while we move into the future. I see how the machinery is taking over the planet, how technology is slowly heading into the direction where only technology exists. F--k it; just spend a day pulling something like twenty logs out of the bush with a team and you will discover something no one else can discover unless they, too, will lay it all out on the face of existence and let the dice roll where they will.

By all that is held holy and spiritual, you will never discover the same revelation from some computerized gadget attempting to direct our thoughts and our lives. Writing and publishing, and the very fact that books are simply wonderful when they achieve what we aim to achieve-the cooperation of author, publisher and reader-will, to me, always keep us connected.

Computers are attempting to replace writing; they have their own short-form vocabulary now. So many of my old friends have been lost by replacing writing with instant, short-form communication. They are lost and I have lost them as old friends.

When me and my lady love started out with a team of horses, Andy and Prince, two beautiful Clydesdale wild animals, I wrote a poem about this very issue. I called it Profile of Death.

God broke my truck.
He took the frame between
his fingers of pure love
and pure light and snapped it
like a match stick.
He made a change in my plans,
with his shoulder of thunder
he pushed me back onto the path
of my destiny, helpless as an infant
I stood before the marooned machine,
tools in powerless hands, feeling like a man
armed with only a fountain pen full of blood,
facing, in the stars, the unexpected
constellation that foretells his death
in a final signature of light.

Defeated by the piston
born out of rhythm
blood-tied to Sun pulse
bull, buffalo, green grass,
I lay in the snow under the
greasy, dirty motor totally
drained of invention.

It was only when I gathered the reins
of my gentle horses of the Alberta Foothills
and hooked them onto the rolling hulk of
metal despair and dragged it,
against the nature of its dark
dynasty up to the top of the mountain,
only then did I feel,
once again, like a man.

From Spit on Wishes, 1983

[This opinion piece was solicited by BC BookWorld... with a phone call.]