Postcard 100

 

Wear your heart in your fists, hard beating and quick.
You grow weary. You grow weak -- that's ok.
Drop shaking legs to knee to pray.
To whom, or to what, should you pray?

Grace to your fear, four in hand
frothing before you and driven here
Smoke offerings to your rage and wrath
To smite is divine, most divine.
What can you burn, incensed?
Your pain -- a mantra chanted --
goes two ways, burnt away or fetisized.

Rise like cedar, rise like tides, rise like distant smoke
Rise refreshed with sharp white teeth rebuking.
With shoulders wide, unyoked the past.
This has gotten out of hand.

Wear your heart in your fists fragile and kind.
You grow open and strong. You rise like quick pulse,
like tectonic shift shake casting off.
Like a switchblade you wield your sharp mind.
You straddle canyons deep, long and wide.

Wear our good weakness like a shield.
Where is wisdom? You are wisdom bound.
Wear your heart in your fists, hard beating and quick

Postcard 96

Today is a day of disdain. Please, goddammit, don't talk to me.
My hands, they hurt are sore, are tight, are stiff, are pain.
The air is crisp, the ground is steaming hard.
My empty hands are filled with strain. Desire.
Reason is to desire, irrelevant. My never-silent hands speak in open-closing pain.
They are screaming to create: that never filled desire that only grasps at soon-to-be.
Create: to paint, to ply to press, to pull up weeds, create a patch.
Bending fingers toward a thing or lack, the sweat and grip of pulling time into the now,
into a never satisfying was.
To create: the belly urge to hold in palm the beauty of 'to be'.
To create: is to, at least, participate. To draw up hot what cooling words cannot.
To finger-dig, to feel nails drawn back with smooth flesh resist. Those fingernail nerves that pass all through.
To plow, to sew, to reap to burn.
To skin to skin apprehend your passing beauty, the beauty I have hand in, in the holding, in the letting go.
In autumnal beauty held in pain, for a moment we substantiate, and then again again again, desire.

Postcard 95

When I, strong armed, roll up my sleeves, Look out!

The earth, it bulges with my gravity

When I crack my eyes steel blue, beware.

I milk stones for sweetness,  draw rainbow eyes and bent teeth smiles.

Despite yourself, you see my dog, a natural beast on line

Her teeth are cat, her hackles sharp as precipice

Her joy a deathly joy. Look out!

Here come my friend all shaking like liquid stones

They truck in no poor company, My friends

 -- my many knuckled friends --move blood as quick fierce as family

Behind you, are my two sons, unknown as uncut wood

and my daughter -- a Diana-- a revealed mystery

The huntress in the woods, flushing fear like rattle-antlered deer

Kneel. Obsequiate - my wife, flesh bound, is worth but me

She draws more than space, dark night, even she is terrified

When you drown, she will be the sea

Her name is Awe

and mine is Word

When I tug at my sleeves, look out!

Postcard 93

"Writing will create forgetfulness in the learner's souls."
Once, the whole story was fluid in a head. The story settled and filled and flowed like the ever-changing, same-named river. Each word was a drop, each meaning a bond.
I must abandon this analogy before -- as all analogies must -- it fails. I will leave it with you to gather and precipitate.
Give me a book. Give me a pile of books! Give me a mountain of books! Let it collapse upon me. Let if fall like an altar to hubris, a crushed babel.
There are two ways to kill a word, you see. First, define it. Second, write it down.
Like a man, a word is only when it connects, meaning - ever sought - between the names. Keep up! Every word is analogy. Every word pursues its meaning, as slick as water in hand. Remember, metaphor, analogy reduced becomes idolatry.
Carve a book and see!
It was easy enough, but now, with new tablet in hand, we descend, the whole world transcribed. No more creation spoken over the water. No more speak friend and enter depths.
Yet, in this embarrassment of riches is a new Homeric memory we can each and all access. I can rise from that avelanche. I can be a standing white crest in stream. I can reach outward to my fellow beings.
Hold and release!
Here is what you must do: discard, discard! Divest of this and this purpose here. The meaning is between the words. The meaning is the travel from my hand to yours. The meaning is the enriched blood, and words the stale air exhaled. But all around, on glass, on walls, precipitate!

Postcard 90

Sitting with my guilt that runs the low points of my flaws. Sitting, swimming I should say, in down-bent cataracts seeking base, cutting away at solid ground. Looking up to slimming sky, to ever further topsoil loam, to ragged edges built on many layered pasts, bisected. Oh the beauty! Oh the colors of those histories stacked -- but dead. This is how contours are cut. This is how dark aquifers are fed. Over gravelly sunless beds, this is where my guilt is purified. Here, it is only the flow of actions leeching limestone from my marrowed bones. It is only me. But of those backward cut cliffs, there is another way -- of tumult, growth and friction. I must uproot the earth itself, thrust firmament against firmament and up! There are powers, deeply sought, that can sunlight the high parts of me. Stark precipices shrugging off poor action, making high streams feeding growth supple and green.

Postcard 80

There's that old cat lady again, that cantankerous anarchist flipping me off. Up at dawn, stocking redoubts in every weather, she feeds the cats with pure passion love. She feeds the cats with whole heart regardless. She stands on a pike of dead wild birds. She wakes and stands upon the ten thousand.
Despair of wholeness.
Each day, every day in drought, I watch the trees die. When the rains finally came, the  soil was washes away and the trees upturned in loosened clay. Dead trees watered are dead just the same.Do you know the last act of a dying tree? Its seeds. Bare brown branches bristling with cones and pods.
The other day in the grocery store line, I ran into the cat lady. But for the cans and cans of cat food, I did not recognize her, and without my hat and shirt and truck, she did not know me. I watched her in her loneliness, her free given love and her will to life, and I thought -- there goes a saint. A saint of feral cats under the dead trees.
Today, today after years of drought and weeks of rain, the levees are overrun and the swollen ground will take no more. The birds play in ponds where paths used to be. Today we lost two more trees. Despairing of wholeness, I feel like the drowning ground.
But consider the seeds.

Postcard 77

When they say danger, well what is safe? Is safety destroy-create? No, safety is sterility. And where you may say destroy-create, which is forever yes, they will say no, obliterate. Where shall we live? In something called a house? And if we must move, then we must drive. We must have drive and then success, which we know, but they will name arrival (at a wasteland), clothed, prepared and stranded. We know this dream, the lotus dream of constant invitation. We must prop open eyes and use legs unbuckling to carry them that would be us.The only dream bigger than our myths is success. When they say secure, they mean invest. Well, cash is the only lie bigger than the fictions we make with stone and gel and sound and ink and pen. The lie of the present, future-bent. An open car on a desert trip. Sometimes we are right to boo,and sometimes it is good to burn and to watch the dishonesty: When they say danger, they mean we, the honest liars. When they say secure, invest, they mean forget. When they sing praise, exalt, show up at vigil, mourn, respect -- what they mean is they are terrified of destroy-create, are terrified of terrified, of waking up and clarity and please please please forget.