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