Postcard 132

No glass on this beach washed flat. Only sand.
And no fires (see above). Only sand -- a broad gleaming tablet, gold and blank.
My bare feet are cipher markers. My new stick marks lines.
From above my cipher says I walk upright, I'm curious.
My line says I lean a bit to one side.
I strike out an image much larger than me with stick lines scrawled sharp and deep.
My vision, too, has a bit of lean.
My image I can apprehend, but only from one side at a time.
Who can see my lines are straight? My shapes are true? And of course, the tide returns.
The waves step broad and light, strike shallow mark as clear and flat as glass.
What did I say, what did I say?
My darling, I have etched upon you some of my memory
-- some scratched light, some punched deep. A good apprehension of me, sidelong.
And the waves slip back under themselves, then the waves slip in.
And my darling, I have etched upon me some of you, memories from just this side.
All in all we are together overlapping scrawls of wave washed memory.
Oh my darling hold on to me. Oh my darling lost like glass.
From where you are, can you apprehend I am slipping out to sea.
The cipher of my footfall, wave-washed, points to sea.

Postcard 131

Use this, use this. Where is the right tool? Anything! The sharpest blade grows fastest dull. Useless. Understanding, careful caught, dried to knowing -- sand in hand. Use this, use this. Every problem has a hammer, right? Beat together to fall apart. Every hammer needs a handle. Beat apart to glass. Use this, use this. Glass blown. Glass glows. Glass grows like hair. Brittle words. Brittle words like fragile birds in air. Use this. Use this. What carries light and sound? Light of load and sound of structure. Scratch line with white hot nail -- pain-etched scratch-raised light and pale. Scars, stitch-bound and suture-tought. Use this use this. Every wound is lesson learned. Every hammer needs a nail. Every pane is pockmarked. Every hand holds fingers. Every finger holds its nail. Every hand is hammer-ready. Every word is frail. Use this. Use this. Lessons shatter out like veins. Every scar is pain once taught. Every word was once a flutter of desire contained. Every shard of glass was once a million grains of sand. Every hammer blow was swing of arm. Use this use this. Where is the right and proper tool? Every tool was once blood carved sharp and bright, the truest, light and sound. Useless. Useless.

Postcard 129

New clay

too tired

finger work

knead Touch

tips round

belly sand

brown Wireless

stretch sag

fitted Slouch

in fresh

sex over

stove clatter

Steep beans

cherry seeds

carraway

Outside in

seeps Street

neighbors

play, low

violence

Snap scrap

radio

Back fat

grease shatter

Awake Awake

Hot damn

cough clear

Walls sway

shoulder settle

ceiling beam

Pull toes

reach dust

curl grit

hair grease

Glass grime

sun streak

Leg leg

iron smell

damp scruff

little self

Hold clay

mold  Seed

spent Seed

clear empty

clean frail

exhale

Long lean

grim bulb

dull Lean

limb hung-ry

Skid dream

ash can

Bittler breath

settle settle

Dark self

smear glass

clear eye

see self

True eyes

true Squint

square blue

Eye teeth

crooked true

Full tongue

soft cheek

roll Full full

pinch shut

Pants snap

boot black

Eggshell

Eggshell

Doorway Grip

thready hat

Grime sweat

Honest work

Stay stay

look back

Porcelain

look back

Sheet bunch

look back

Stay stay

Full belly

woman hip

sway Door

way latch

foot fall

Man man

sand brown

beard face

clay tired

Clay

Postcard 128

The bridge was modern and elegant. Pure white. A lesson in synthesis of fragile lesser parts. Of ghostly strength from synthesis. It arched over a green valley holding an ocean tributary. People came to look down from the bridge, to look up at the bridge, to play in the clean waters under its gossamer shadows. For a time, a pod of whales came to the bridge, rolling lazily in the sun, playing slowly and powerfully in the shallow waters. This brought more people, drawn by their strength so delicately shared. One day, a whale somehow got one of its long pectoral fins tangled in the lattice footworks of the bridge. Neither the whale nor the people panicked at first. It was a novel situation, surely as easily exited as entered. But that was not the case. The whale began to act as one does when inexorably stuck, frantic and panicking, writhing and wounding itself in the struggle. The people perceived that at that particular footing, the tide would withdraw leaving the whale beached on a sandbar. Groups began to organize around various intentions. The other whales had returned to deeper waters, though they too seemed distraught. Whatever intentions there were, were not allowed to materialize. It its struggle, the whale had turned itself over and soon the fight for freedom ceased. There were no people on that dark night when the tide lifted the drowned whale without effort and easily removed its slack fin from the bridge footing, and carried the whale away.

Postcard 127

The Unbecoming of Self (Harpers 336) They take me, take, take me away & that takes my sleep away. There she is in that place & she can't get out. I'm like a slow motion version of my old self. Where's my wife? I want my wife. Giraffe -- they just run around don't they? Chickens -- I guess chickens are animals. Pigs! We had a farm & I liked the pigs! I feel very good all the time, oh boy! Why is that woman bothering me? My butt is drunk. I have everything done! Everything done. Its all going in the place that goes in the place for each. This is not a bad thing. It is just a different thing. It requires different kinds of attention.

For all of us who fear -- I must die so that others may live. It will be my mind, I suspect, that kills me. Or, amusingly, my other end - either one incontinent. Lets not discount a failure of skin, or my heart gets up in protest. Anyhow, I will go, finally unknown, finally unknowable. I may leave, but I will go and others will be. Should I rage, should I fight, who or what would I resist, but me -- unknown letting go? I say easy sink into dark sea unrelenting. I say, feed another stream. Fold up on myself. And, half written, half unknown, O rejoice at being. A being beyond my own design, wondering if I did it well. Well, did I? Let go of words, of hard won thoughts like me, thou, I. I must die so others may be. Return to sea.

Postcard 126

Do not think for a moment
that I don't take stock:

Four starlings harass
an egg-hungry crow
a sheaf of blank paper
-clear white terror
A blue tarp threadbarely clinging to
a single anchor, marks and charts
every pitch and yaw of wind
This hand
-ten solid scars
eleven on the other
Halfway between them,
a single wrinkled plum-pit of being
-bottomless, inscrutable
(In the space of)
seven broken sentences
eight people have passed by
-some to
-mostly fro
Only two of them distracted me
An hour of sunlight in
my cup of coffee
-bitter black
-cool in mouth
Both legs a-tingle
half asleep
My body sleeping on the job
A full bladder
(as distinct from
but not separate from)
a stirring of loins at
a somewhat unwelcome pleasant memory
Four. No,
five. Now
nine or ten cut memories
A single unseen and unconcerned editor of thought
One guilty thought
the table rocks
one half an inch on
four legs
An itch I cannot scratch
A friendly red dog

I am just getting started

Postcard 125

I don't know
I don't know what I'm for
Be a river of sunshine
Be a graceful piece of thunder

Out on serpentine, the prairie grass
moves beneath the moving wind
with no uncertain grace.
Rooted, then suspend

Cloud-banks and cattle fatly graze,
and chirping careless birds
all seem idle within a nature
of brute consequence

In being, in making sense,
I slide and do I root?
My eyes are full of greens &
bending blue of sky

My ears -- the hum
of wind in trees, of dreamy
sunning bugs, of flirting seeds &
careless spume -- go mute

I settle like the hunch of fence &
warm boards, thoughtless,
unsensed. I root and settle
I am unmade

My surface skittles in the wind.
I am unmade, reduced to hand,
my fat reach, my extend. Ants &
ants. two flies loop and land.

I am two hands overlapped to hold
with every free nerve. To hold the moving air.
To bend beneath and finally to be held.
For a moment to behold every free nerve

To beheld

Postcard 124

You are the high lake and You are the cradle
You are the cold deep and You are the clear springs that feed
You are the split lip smile of wild and You are the salt skinned christian child
You are the arching rider and You are the tugging underneath
You are the high plains spirit and You are the dirty spoon in milky bowl
You are the raw gravel-set heel You are the gap in teeth
You are the end of two straightblack lanes and You are the shimmering heat
You are the broken yellow lines and You are the coffee stain on passengers seat
You are the click in the dark of the thermostat and You are the rattle of keys
You are the thin wear of that brown flowered dress
You are the suitcase under the bed.
You are the rain on the creosote and You are the goatheaded thorn
You are the thin song of plain gray little birds and You are their thin reedy home
You are the thunderhead and You are the cicadas return
You are the rich air of imminent storm
You are the cold beer behind the wheel and You are the itinerant soul
You are the grit on sunburnt neck and You are the sundowner song on radio
You are the single lucky gas station at night and You are the bent pack of cigarettes
You are the red spattered glass and you are the crumpled bird roadside
You are the careless grace of the broad naked sky and You are the million stars across your face
You are the pink scars on your elbows and knees and You are the pull at your heart

Postcard 123

The man descends. He is weary. It seems easier this way. Finally, he comes to a landing.
The final door there is unlocked and opens to basement and the guts of the building. Tubes and pipes come and go, leaping around corners, plunging off to obscurity. Some feed the building above, buzzing and hissing aggressively. Some burble its waste off to labyrinthine bowels below. The man touches the hand rail and recoils. Every surface is clammy and damp and somehow active. A great unconscious industry prevails, cold, rust-brown. He had not imagined he wold end up here. He had some job to do. Some job..? All along he had been sure he was to ascend -- to seek some goal in the high opened ceiling clear glass room at the top. Yet here he stands. The man leaves the catwalk for the solid floor. Hard. An aluminum chute drops debris in a rattling of noise and movement. He jumps. Now all sounds are heartbeat, breathing. His previous confidence returns with his gun in his hand, but it is different. It is reduced and shallow. He moves through the cluttered industrial space, efficient, intentional, yet without belief. His feet move athletically. He keeps his back to anything solid. His arms hold the small gun near, like springs. But every body part extends away like foreign things. The man as man is retracting behind his eyes, to the back of his head, the base of his skull. He hears voices and moves near. He comes round a corner to a hall and further on another corner. He sees the figure and strikes. His gun fires twice and jams. He throws it at the figure and finally sees. He is in a small boy's bedroom. He is alone. He has shot twice a poster of that popular action star. He withers and collapses in the boy's bed. The voice is clear now -- a woman's, "I don't know who he is. You'd better send someone. Yes."

Postcard 122

But for us there would have been a forest here.
But for us there would have been a teeming sea.
Is treefall a snap? A bang?
But for us  there would have been rejoicing
-- trunks raised to the dawn and singing out,
and open-faced leaves.
Sparrow-fall is silent is it not?
But for us we would have been noble stewards
of each holy spoken name.
When a final creature earth-fall trundles to does it know,
and is last breath a whisper or a groan?
But for us there would have been substance
beneath each spoken name.
Who will sing out, the stones?
Know there is a sound to nullity
-- a persistent wailing groan.
But for us there'd be no myth.
Is myth just story toward the groan.
Myth of leopards.
Myth of bats.
Myth of death singing emerald frogs
from the cups of leaves.
Myths of leaves.
Myth of morning greeting elephants.
Myth of condors.
Myths of oceans filled with fish.
Myth of whales of ancient geneology
in ledgers of old wooden ships.
Myth of squids, of worms, of eels.
Myth of great white buffalo.
Myth of spiders sharks and snakes
etched in our spines.
Myth of bird or bee or locust blotting out the sunlit sky.
Myth of any place that is not a waste.
Myth lumbering toothless into desolate twilight.
We will, like the stones, cry out in groaning lament