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 65

One of these mornings, some fine morning, we're going to go down. Down on to those waters, yes we're going to clean those waters like a swarm. Oh, we're going to filter those waters like oysters, like mussel clusters, like a host of shrimp. One of these mornings, oh its gonna come, that fine day, we're gonna go down to that shore. We're gonna give that boatman. that old ferry man, we're gonna give him a brand new silver dollar not to take us anywhere. That ferryman's gonna leave us there. One of these mornings we're gonna dig down in that mud with our naked toes. We're gonna lay down a new foundation . Oh we're gonna dig down in that mud like clams and lay a new foundation with our bones. Oh that lovely blessed day, we're gonna put up new walls smooth and white. We're gonna put up bleach white walls, pure and bright. Bright as that new day. One fine morning, some fine morning, we're gonna go down. We're gonna go down to our new houses shining in the blessed sun. Our star-roofed houses will have many rooms, each bigger than the next. Oh on that day, our houses will be ours. One of these days, we'll toss that poor ol' ferryman a bag of pearls. And then, oh then -- one of these fine mornings coming down, we're gonna lift up that house. Oh, we're gonna lift up our homes in this world. We're gonna lift up our new homes and we're gonna walk right on away.

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 54

To see as a stone, a geolithic indifference. To know that heat will follow cold, that pain will crumble to the comforting pulse of annihilation. To sit and not to respond. Thrust up to grinding glacial peaks, rolled and split, a pit held between the teeth of water and air. To sit like a sage on the seafloor waiting without hope for the tides to recede. To love and lust for only one thing -- the strain of gravity.To only join with and to. To only join with other stones. Indifferent to dayless space, carelessly collecting, brilliantly discarding frosty dust, seeking only parabolic speed of pull. The only thing to hold is weight. The only pull is gravity. The only things are other stones: melted and fluid, vaporous and free, organized -- for moments -- and alive. To vaporize in the friction of pull. To impact and melt. 

To dissolve. 

To dissolve in the pulse between one pull and another. To dissolve in the freedom of weightlessness. To commune with solvent water. To commute in bloody tides and ichor currents. To be as stone harnessed and unharnessed. Harnessed by gravity; unharnessed in liquid suspension. To be as stone, itinerant traveler of days flickering by like film. To be as stone, witness impassive and unimpressed the gradual imminence of erosion. To be what is and only that and then to not, to falter and seam, to split and to tumble, to gather and release, to melt igneous, to seek and stack, to compress and granulate. To swallow chalky skeletons, to seek a mean, to dissolve and always -- above all -- gravity, To crystalize.