Postcard 191

We sat and

then we stand

footfall footfall

climb hand over hand

legs strong as sheep

hot sun south side

shale slide stone sharp

shear face ever steep

skidee skidee

 

whistle songs

wind scream short

breath blister knee

there goes and there

goes and another fall free

 

precipice precipice

 

stone fall stone fall

all is gravity gravid pull is all

leg up leg up foot down foot

down knees buckle

like ice crack-weak

as water melt snow pack

collapse ice in schist

lithic split

 

carapice carapice

 

snow crash avalanche

stress and split buckle

break through mountain feet

chasm canyon stream unend

valley carve valley make

valley carve valley make

 

the ache the ache

 

too high breath

too high the ache

Postcard 94

When we ran within twilight forest, through the ruin of limitless pillar-like trees
When we caught eyes in firelight sharp, or in the slack return of horizon moon
When those moments blink by, brief phosphorescent things -- like glow-worms,
salamanders in the fire -- seen unseen, unseen and seen
When we fell for a breath, in breath-catched love,
I knew that I would later think -- this is the gilding of our mortality.

These lives shed purpose like autumn trees.
And names and words and moments too, but sound it echoes like memories.
When we ran into twilight woods, the moiling duff slipped loose beneath us, as deep and loose as meaning. Your skin is already cool where my wide hands held and pulled you up. And your silhouette, so primal to my hungry sight, is now so slight and rarefied as your downy body's moonlit hair.
When we ran through twilight, time and all was desire and loss.
It was the loss that gave truth to the ephemeral, the unprovable of want and had.

If someone bottle-captures life
If they cure mortality, here is what the cost will be --
twilight forest falling,
love and all its painful coterie,
the spike of fear in constant loss,
meaning loose without utility,
and finally, that pleasant kind forgiving glow of forever faulty memories

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 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 60

Seek a stillness in solitude with the wind's own sibilance. 

Seek a stillness but not a silence:

Hush of breath, heart's ichor woosh, ceaseless whisper of world and whirl.

What words or wordlessnesses wayfare there?

Seek a stillness and hear.

Can we make the cooling cooking buzz of the far horizon,

The slow moan of plates and seas exalted and subsumed,

Patient histories of tribes and herds and trees?

Do we hear the grassy, snow-melting slouched shouldering of each season?

Do we hear the clicks and crunches of consume devour in root-balls and swaying blades of grass?

If we can hear these things, if we perceive some other scale of being, what does it say?

In my solitude, seeking stillness, I wonder at the power of the human day to overspeak, to stifle.

I wonder at the frailty of all these eternities in me collapsing in a human day 

-- a scale of tires on roads, of cords and plugs, 

the strange pains of want and need.

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.