Postcard 91

 

Look to yourself.
Look toward the peregrinations of your high subtle mind. The high bird's-eye thoughts casting constant shadow upon your ruddy wayward days.
Do you have heavy mud on your boots?
Do you carry old and hungry seeds,
Do you till endless ground,
Do you pitch unsellable goods,
Do you wander hostile sign-less streets?
Is there relief, you wonder, that is not rotten with defeat?
Is there rest that is not mud pitched foundering?
Will wrong-heated anger relent but to numbness?
Look to yourself and see.
A flutter and an uncanny lean catch updraft,
and there is rest held in high and opened wing!
There is cool far-traveled air, itinerant, coursing cooling that stinging vein rage.
And there are seeing, far sighted
          -- past hill and stream and creek and difficulty --
sharp focused, sun-crowned eyes.
Look to your high thoughts when you are in furrow.
Tend to willow-wisps of intuition when you are heavy.
Look to the broad and high when you are embattled.
Within is a broad winged stranger
Within are well groomed feathers fletched.
Within are sharp orb eyes tied straight to every nerve.
Within are bones cleaning beak and talon, pulling from thin air.
Within is stranger that is you,
a strange wayfarer aged and wise that knows and tells with its shadow:
There are mountains past those crude hills
And beyond are moon birthing seas
There are summers and winters and sun-eating ice-fields
and land beyond that goes and goes and then returns

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 89

The child stood under a shaggy palm in his crabgrass frontyard. It was that thief in the night, called desert spring.  The child, a boy about four years old, golden-haired, striped-shirted, was pondering the strange whims of nature. The same rare breeze that tousled his hair like a father, also tousled the palm and shook from its bunch of dead fronds the easter-egg blue eggs of two-penny sparrows. Some were, amazingly, unbroken. Some leaked broken yolk. A couple revealed still-born chicks. And look -- a horrible miracle -- a still living chick struggling in small circles and stretching its neck. A girl came out of her house across the street and called to him. She was about five or six and had long straight hair. Maybe she was beautiful; he couldn't know. There was a fake wishing well in her front yard. It seemed mystical. They chattered like birds for a bit. The boy was new to the neighborhood and this was an exciting welcoming. But next door, in a hardpacked yard with white-painted trees and cockeyed pickup trucks, another boy emerged. He didn't like the girl and she didn't like him. He shouted across insults and she shouted retorts. C'mon, said the boy, and he picked up some dirtclods and pitched them across the street. He was aiming for the girl but they fell short. C'mon! And the first boy looked to him, hard and sure, sunbrowned and beautiful, then to the girl, so far away across the street. He picked up a dirtclod and threw it, then another. She did not cry, but retreated into her house. The child felt a new feeling and determined that he could not show his new friend the eggs and baby sparrows.

Postcard 88

Songs of my country:

There is the unmissable martial song of sturm und drang. Inherited, it stretches back through time like a column -- infantry batteries, cavalry, supply train. Loud and grand and simple. The words, matching beats, do not change: Patriot! Gallantry! Mother-Father-Homeland! Bravery!
Try and be the brave one who stands stoic, sober, calm and quiet within this eager violent cavalcade.

But behind that -- listen slight -- is a chorus wise with injury and pain. The women's song, masked and robed praising Fates of irony and folly, tragedy and dark humor strained. Singing songs of every privation, rape and pillage, and every wounded soldier's fist-transferred pain. The chorus is a windy chant of natural force as ever present as the air, but rises sometime banshee-like to gale, to tempest, to typhoon -- madness of despair

But of despair there is a song we must listen low to hear. True, it is easy to ignore, but once heard it is there and there and there. It is the dirge of black mothers left with only broken sons. The rhythm is the slow trampling of hoses, clubs, and dogs, and guns. The rhythm is the blood tamped dirt, the swaying of young tree-hung bodies in the breeze.

There is the song of un-earned power, that fears the limits of its guns, that fears and sings more loudly still...but then there is the song of slow power justly earned and won. The songs that percolate in well graced anger, in wombs and blood rich soil. Where fear is wrung out and all but gone.