Postcard 74

The room was fire warmed and candle-lit, dark in the corners. The room was a stone cloister with elaborately carved shelves of heavy wood filled with ancient books. The room held warmth like the bright hope of a monastic diaspora, like the wisdom sitting silently bound upon the shelves. In that room in that medieval port metropolis, a young man sat chatting earnestly with his friend Joshua, Joshua's father a rabbi, and the father's mentor, an elder Rebbe wrinkled and scarred, a tragic old face from tragic times and a gleam in his eyes. The four there, debated life, free of dogma or pedantry, debated passion and purpose and spirit. That night the two young men were preparing to go out to carnival, and they did just that. The streets were a riot of color and noise, or fires that tempted conflagration, of liberties that threatened damnation. In the tumult, the two young men, the jew and the gentile, strolled and marveled until they were happily separated, trusting always in their fidelity. The young man walked on till he came to a small square in a district he didn't know. There was a low platform in the middle, and upon it a dark woman sat alone, apart -- for a moment -- from the reverie. She was beautiful and harsh and, though he was attracted to her, he feared her. She caught him with her eyes like an arrow on a string. She pulled him to her and regarded him coldly, eyes locked on his. With her left hand she pulled up her layers and put his hand between her legs. The warmth that held his fingers passed through him with a shudder like strong wine. He had never been that close to a woman. Her lips parted but they did not move. She held him then released him. With cold kindness she sent him away with a kind and empty promise. He saw that their connection was true but also false and that he was at play for a moment in a drama that she had for herself in every direction.

Postcard 63

Came up from four-cornered desert. Ive got four lovers there.
First one rattletraps and drives out of Reno like a wild and speckled mare.
They got her slam-gated up on that highway down the coast,
bound for Pomona. They gonna break her over that glitter rodeo fence.
I come up from four-cornered desert like a lost postcard with too much blank space to fill.
Too much chalk-gypsum white light dust and time to kill.
My second lover was a ghost who spoke into herself and hid fierce scared eyes in wild dark hair.
Her freewheeling trailer is parked on bricks, and she won't come in till the well dusts dry.
Come up from four-cornered desert like an indian cross.
White bones under a hot yellow sun in a turquoise sky.
She's got that inlaid silver on her wrist.
All I remember is a bench seat on a school bus and a cool dry kiss
and too hot car seats and sweet cigarette breath and the dust in the light and the shimmer of heat.
Came up from four-cornered desert that no one is from, and all four directions are out and away.
Had a slim lover with a lean sharp sway.
She grew slow and ripe as a cactus on a windy hill.
She was a beauty but guarded and cruel.
When I think of her I think of a stunted bush we passed as we walked to school,
and in the hottest months, the fruit we stole and split and its sweet chill.
I come up from four-cornered desert horrified by my own magic and any magic I had grabbed:
silver rings and bracelets, bones and pomegranate seeds, all held up in a horse-hair bag

Postcard 46

Thunderstorms are conspicuously absent here. The bay is a temperate bowl with a narrow spout: sucking in cool wet air from the north, warming it, and spitting it out to the east. Never hot, nor cold, only extreme in the speed of its cycles. 

What do we lose here? 

The kinetic stillness of extremes. In the desert, the tundra, the high mountains, each thing is in status with the other; the ground, the many layers of strata of sky. In a thunderstorm, the very particles hold, are holding, trembling in expectant stillness. In stillness and silence, imminence is present like an inscrutable and polymorphous god. Can we summon or conjure this stillness in our own climatous, calamitous selves? Among each other? Can we bring two together charged and vibrating, in stillness kinetic? Will two, without the distortion of words and minor intents, find a common or complimentary frequency, and oscillate in darkness till some catalyst, some cataclysm releases heat and tension in roaring lightening? 

I believe we are perfect conductors but unsuitable containers for these ecstasies. They would fill the burning of anticipation with the void of arc. We'd sob and moan and laugh in terror and joy, then collapse like spent ozone on a salt-white desert. This is feeling alive in moments. Feeling alive like this is a truth, like sand turned to tubes of black glass, sharp and empty, featureless and cool as a stone knife plunged into flesh. But the sand and the sky and the clouds are also otherwise true. We are also otherwise true without ripping matter asunder.