We have an old treadle-operated grindstone, inherited from my paternal grandparents, but it was a museum piece for us (literally: we kids had a small museum in the old tool shed, featuring many cool old tools such as a hand-cranked winnowing machine and a big ol’ hay cradle).

and “Whether depriving one’s opponents
of their fleshy halos
or making the circuit
of a smoke-filled room,”

Although hard to detach my myself from my current angst about the smoke filled rooms and real politics in present day Pennsylvania, I loved the duality of this indian image. Part peace pipe to be sent around the sacred circle, and part scalper, (provided the ‘halos’ were the diadem of hair we all seem to cultivate. ) Now I could have this wrong, as I so often do, but I guess the freedom of good poetic image is its ability to mean different things to different people, as you just illustrated with Confucius having a different ax to grind than the ‘earthier’ version I liked. (grin)