Postcard 201

  

    I am that fine point where all things converge
    The perch of every bird             -- those messengers
    buzzing humming thumping                                     zip
    What are these poets singing? flashing out so cavalier

    its a riff on time, they say
    its a riff on time

    I am the moving empty thing
    invisible and gathered all in bundles        --wire lined
    fletched light and light winged                            chittering
    all I see unspooled and telegraphed

    its a riff on time see
    its a riff on time
    

Postcard 200

UNDER MY FEET: old heeled boots scuff
black against the spin of the world                                                        -- rollerskate grace
in that liquid spot between
fly and fall, off and down

IN MY HANDS I CARRY: scars and pain exquisite etch
of every path of flesh. Children lovers parents friends                         -- all
carriers of sweet passion rough work and sweat
(they rub an ache mutual, and we recall)

BETWEEN MY BODY & THE WORLD: lives
a bundle of minor miracles. All things I have ever known
come to me -- a hive to honeybees mundane                                        --sweet things
and sizzling on impossible wings

Postcard 199

Autumn has its own demon -- a shudder of locust skins
Bones out and well burnished, a woodsy soil hound
Haunting and haunted, rotting leather bound.

You know the smell -- oily death and oily hair
It enters as the rust caparisoned gentleman
Rattle branch top hat, dead man's cane

The blazing costume cannot sustain --
the demon's in the details -- death
decomposition, ancient pains

Hair and nails do not grow, but remain
Look! the demon's sad dance, no sweep no sway
A pile of dust, leaves blown away

How is the hoarmouth fed?
With empty cold inevitable. There is dry desire,
quaking lust for viscera, the demon's fall fires

viscera unspooled offal, stone
and guts, piled and steaming finally
in autumns dust

Postcard 198

We play the knot beyond the fray
The loop is destined of the bend
Wrap & wrap. Wrap clean to stay & mind
Hold in mind, yet where do loose ends lay

The loop is destined to the bend
Bind secure. Secure is bound
There is an end. There is
another end. Find kink

Find weakness, find crimp, find fray
Tease each fiber, Splice mend & mind
Hold in mind: cord is rope
is strand is sheet is line

To hook to spar bite lash & bind
The loop is destined to the bend
The burn, the hand. The pinion, limbs
The knot, the mind. Hold in mind

and mind make
fast make fast

Postcard 197

Some Definitions:

desolate 

    -thoroughly alone

    -abandoned

abandon

    -to be under control

    -give in

    -surrender to

relinquish

    -to give back from under

    -to leave with intensive force

force

    -pain's own action it cannot understand
 

Postcard 196

September, Thursday of the Year

At a certain low angle of the sun
the day's genesis of water-striders
glitter with inscrutable drive to eat
to fuck to die. The crawdads too decide
to leave their keeps with shallow scurry blooms

Batteries of clouds charge the horizon
Ancient, how many dragonflies have been?
Shooting over the valley's high anvils
bullrush, thrush, collapse, clap, thunder drives us in

After the funeral, I danced dirty
with with widow of the father who died
in the house-fire. All God's children orphaned
desolate, bereft, clipped and beating

Of all this we make music

Postcard 195

 

The time
is finally here
time to leave

The birds
are casting off
their moorings

The trees
are casting off
their leaves

wind
feet
rake plow


I curse the day
I threw a handful of poems
like dragon's teeth into the sea

Even there
you reap as you sow
every word its own demise

I skip
as the stones I throw
And do I wobble

I dont fly
What are these black wings seeking?
to flutter? to beat again?

Word to the wise:
when the waves retreat
don't go looking for the sea

Postcard 194

 

The Moon is weary of all this.
The perpetual motion and perpetual monotony.
The moon feels forever held in tension between the pull of two mighty bodies.
Though if the Moon sits in ts darkness it senses a third, bodyless pull
                                                      -- a pull to void.

The Moon certainly entertains this pull,
but it is just suggestion. The Moon finds itself in a situation
it cannot escape without plunging fully
and catastrophically into one of its two seducers or
                                                       ripping itself apart.

And what of the two beguiling forces?
Are they as subtle as they feel,
or is the precarious balance between them
the source of the feathery elliptical tugging?

The one is distant but so impossibly radiant.
It makes the Moon feel seen, but is the Moon being seen?
Or is it just reflection? If only the Moon could know it was
its own voluptuous curves, its own time earned scars being illuminated,
                                                          rather than just the other's brilliance...

And the other... upon this one the Moon teased effect,
had tickled blue -- with its own small force -- to brown and green.
But what was given back? The close embrace seemed more a projection
of desire. Now? The Moon hangs so tautly
                                                        -- madness

Postcard 193

Father Song
1 January 1988 Pasadena, CA

On new years day
the cold split of ages
my father walked me out
you'll thank me, he said
on a morning, a nascent day, a dawn
to shake the Champ's shaking hand

to hold
to be held
to behold
to be beheld
to be beholden to

You are your mother's
son you were is this
I am split in your river
I see I in you, rift of mothers name
Child, you see you gone

to hold
to be held
to behold
to be beheld
to be beholden to

The Greatest bereft
of fallen roses the bite
of time the sting a flower
float away, will I even
can I have I ever tried

to hold
to be held
to behold
to be beheld
to be beholden to

Like the daughter of the father
who follows him into the ring
I wonder if I echo
the wrong thing

Postcard 192

This being walking barefoot on asphalt to spare river-logged shoes, to feel
crime rise up heat. That much closer to annihilate, devastate, words that chop 

Earth marked soles that coil a simple stretched plane to rolls
to body warmth to dim light to must to just beyond sight

Possession: to own is fuel to anger from which hate is to heat. You know
this being with cracked blackened feet. And

This being, this other one, lies with short toes spread then curled
grabs - kicks down the clean sheet. Where is truth?

This beings with feets too wrapped in bunches folds to see what then?
when these two beings meet, congress, seek truth, stain the sheets