Postcard 79

We are always dying down in steerage -- have always been.
Here's another myth: The captain goes down with the ship.
You travel both on the backs of stevedores in sweat-black walls,
and star-eyed dreamers in sky-less holds,
fire bolted and contained,
water always finding seams.
We are down with the steam.
We are always dying down in steerage --
Hatches closed on water persistent.
Hatches closed on fire unloosed.
Hatches closed on bursting boilers.
Hatches closed on our echoing songs.
We see sky when dead on deck, when over-rail dumped.
Who are the uncounted numbers and who are the names?
We are the heartbeat down in steerage, the piston thud, the hum of driving screw.
We are whomever you call rat: the dago spic queers, the Jews, the junkies, chinks, fags the blacks.
We are the fire behind the hatch. The fluid and the flame, the artist fighters, the exposed wires.
Always dying down in steerage -- always have and always will,
but this ship is a ghost ship, and we hold sway behind hatches
where we hide your wonder and the power,
behind hatches where wanders your desire.
Behind and beneath in the coal-black fires.
While you move over waters, we move through seas.
We are always dying down in steerage -- may always be,
but we are living ripe, dying but pregnant, alive but oddly free.

Postcard 49

At my grandfather's house, at the top of a low alpine mountain, there is a glass cased cabinet. A curio cabinet with glass shelves as well. In there are artifacts from a traveler's life and mission trips around the world: South America, Madagascar, Borneo. There's a large blue butterfly pinned to felt. There's an ostrich egg, creamy and brittle, meticulously carved with lines and shapes, rhythmic and sharp. Mysterious or even meaningless glyphs dyed a deep burnt-umber brown. It has not left that case as long as I have been alive. It is to me a totem without context, as familiar as grandma's many button jars. Though it seems to be, it is hardly a static object. Like you and I, it is gliding seamlessly through time, always moving further from the mind and intent that crafted it. Always shedding meaning, and in its place, gathering like dust the growing likelihood of its annihilation: the catastrophe, the clumsy child, the errant maid, invisible chisels of entropy. I try to forget the seeming irrelevant fact that at thousand of feet of elevation, it is careening along infinitesimally faster that I am here by the sea. Irrelevant, but poignantly true. In comparison, there is little to separate the idea of that egg (platonically, the form) from the idea or form of a book. In fact, there is little that separates that delicate and empty egg, traveling as it is, away from intention and toward non-existence, from a word spoken or a thought produced in the shell of a mind. Each is cloaked in meaning like the feathers of a cormorant: illustrious and drab, loo light for water, too heavy for air, washed up on a beach like a rag, or clothing an ancient royal, but always frangible and changing.