Postcard 61

Two lovers on the beach, bared soles of feet turned up to the sun. Young and trim theres nothing like it. Small boat is offshore tacking with clean white triangle sails. A whole warm world with cold only suggested, to tantalize. What does not glimmer ripple rumor and tremble here? What does not not feel that breath of promise. Breeze on sand, on water, in grass, in sail, on finest hair on skin. Young goose bumped lovers in the heat. Young lovers fingers buried oblivious, a whole warmth untroubled by the promise of shimmer. A family sits nearby. A cloud bank breaks the horizon. The tide works its way in. The breeze is making good on its promise. Have we ever held such smiles? A son capsizes his new boat. A daughter runs into the sea. Two lovers on the beach, naked to the world, light a joint, bury face in face. Youth, always youth.

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.