Postcard 97

Blood and sweat, laughter, tears -- things that drip and flow and peal. We enter and come with pain-pleasure, the push-pull of pulse flow. A new clean spring draws stones from soil, mountains sharp in cut and cry.
And old King Whirl, born crying, comes round on himself, self-satisfied and corpulent with the collect, the labor's sweat, the g;uttony of damn-up. collect and swell.
And old Death comes on like a flood and a drought, sooth-said and expected. Old death, a nattering madman, muttering and humming, meaning nothing. He carries, in his moment, cataracts of tears, lifetimes flowing ocean lightly.
Then finally peals out what is most feared, Silence. She speaks from corner to corner, to rafter's peak. Not a sign, not a moan, not a creak not a woosh not a drip not a groan or a squeak. But listen close and tight and do not waiver in the quiet deep and you will add the fluid peal of laughter, whole and pure and real.

Postcard 96

Today is a day of disdain. Please, goddammit, don't talk to me.
My hands, they hurt are sore, are tight, are stiff, are pain.
The air is crisp, the ground is steaming hard.
My empty hands are filled with strain. Desire.
Reason is to desire, irrelevant. My never-silent hands speak in open-closing pain.
They are screaming to create: that never filled desire that only grasps at soon-to-be.
Create: to paint, to ply to press, to pull up weeds, create a patch.
Bending fingers toward a thing or lack, the sweat and grip of pulling time into the now,
into a never satisfying was.
To create: the belly urge to hold in palm the beauty of 'to be'.
To create: is to, at least, participate. To draw up hot what cooling words cannot.
To finger-dig, to feel nails drawn back with smooth flesh resist. Those fingernail nerves that pass all through.
To plow, to sew, to reap to burn.
To skin to skin apprehend your passing beauty, the beauty I have hand in, in the holding, in the letting go.
In autumnal beauty held in pain, for a moment we substantiate, and then again again again, desire.

Postcard 95

When I, strong armed, roll up my sleeves, Look out!

The earth, it bulges with my gravity

When I crack my eyes steel blue, beware.

I milk stones for sweetness,  draw rainbow eyes and bent teeth smiles.

Despite yourself, you see my dog, a natural beast on line

Her teeth are cat, her hackles sharp as precipice

Her joy a deathly joy. Look out!

Here come my friend all shaking like liquid stones

They truck in no poor company, My friends

 -- my many knuckled friends --move blood as quick fierce as family

Behind you, are my two sons, unknown as uncut wood

and my daughter -- a Diana-- a revealed mystery

The huntress in the woods, flushing fear like rattle-antlered deer

Kneel. Obsequiate - my wife, flesh bound, is worth but me

She draws more than space, dark night, even she is terrified

When you drown, she will be the sea

Her name is Awe

and mine is Word

When I tug at my sleeves, look out!

Postcard 94

When we ran within twilight forest, through the ruin of limitless pillar-like trees
When we caught eyes in firelight sharp, or in the slack return of horizon moon
When those moments blink by, brief phosphorescent things -- like glow-worms,
salamanders in the fire -- seen unseen, unseen and seen
When we fell for a breath, in breath-catched love,
I knew that I would later think -- this is the gilding of our mortality.

These lives shed purpose like autumn trees.
And names and words and moments too, but sound it echoes like memories.
When we ran into twilight woods, the moiling duff slipped loose beneath us, as deep and loose as meaning. Your skin is already cool where my wide hands held and pulled you up. And your silhouette, so primal to my hungry sight, is now so slight and rarefied as your downy body's moonlit hair.
When we ran through twilight, time and all was desire and loss.
It was the loss that gave truth to the ephemeral, the unprovable of want and had.

If someone bottle-captures life
If they cure mortality, here is what the cost will be --
twilight forest falling,
love and all its painful coterie,
the spike of fear in constant loss,
meaning loose without utility,
and finally, that pleasant kind forgiving glow of forever faulty memories

Postcard 93

"Writing will create forgetfulness in the learner's souls."
Once, the whole story was fluid in a head. The story settled and filled and flowed like the ever-changing, same-named river. Each word was a drop, each meaning a bond.
I must abandon this analogy before -- as all analogies must -- it fails. I will leave it with you to gather and precipitate.
Give me a book. Give me a pile of books! Give me a mountain of books! Let it collapse upon me. Let if fall like an altar to hubris, a crushed babel.
There are two ways to kill a word, you see. First, define it. Second, write it down.
Like a man, a word is only when it connects, meaning - ever sought - between the names. Keep up! Every word is analogy. Every word pursues its meaning, as slick as water in hand. Remember, metaphor, analogy reduced becomes idolatry.
Carve a book and see!
It was easy enough, but now, with new tablet in hand, we descend, the whole world transcribed. No more creation spoken over the water. No more speak friend and enter depths.
Yet, in this embarrassment of riches is a new Homeric memory we can each and all access. I can rise from that avelanche. I can be a standing white crest in stream. I can reach outward to my fellow beings.
Hold and release!
Here is what you must do: discard, discard! Divest of this and this purpose here. The meaning is between the words. The meaning is the travel from my hand to yours. The meaning is the enriched blood, and words the stale air exhaled. But all around, on glass, on walls, precipitate!