I’ve been looking at a lot of old postcards lately. I found my dad’s collection up in the attic: several thousand postcards, going back to the beginning of the 20th century. Turns out that it was once very common to write things on the front, as we encourage people to do for Postal Poetry. Originally, the U.S. Post Office didn’t allow anything besides the address on the back, so the front was the only place where one could add a personal message. Depending on the quality of the sender’s penmanship, sometimes the effect is almost reminiscent of a classic East Asian painting, with calligraphy encroaching on the subject. This practice continued for a while after the advent of postcards with divided backs in 1907. “The Golden Age of American postcards […] lasted until about 1915, when World War I blocked the import of the fine German-printed cards,” according to the Wikipedia.
Here’s a card my Great Great Aunt Mildred Albertson, a Methodist missionary, sent from Japanese-occupied Korea (though it depicts Kobe, Japan) in October 1907.
The message says, in part, “Every thing seems so different here from home. I feel like a baby in every sense of the word. Have a teacher, and am studying the language. Have not heard from any of home folks yet.”
Half of the dead bats that lie like jetsam
around the tall masts of wind turbines
appear unharmed, wingbones unbroken,
their ears’ stiff calipers still cocked.
But an autopsy finds their lungs
flooded with blood, as if punctured
by invisible splinters. It seems
each whirling blade grows
a zone of low pressure at its tip,
& the bats, attracted to the motion,
are caught unprepared — for what
in 50 million years of evolution
could’ve prepared them for barotrauma
bursting the web of vessels in their lungs,
so that they drown in the air?
Their dun or silver bodies crumple
like divers with the bends.
Exquisitely tuned sonar systems go silent.
The propellors spin on, as if in service
to some vast, uncaptained ship,
a new Flying Dutchman, yawing
under the glue-eyed moon.
__________
Written in response to a Read Write Poem prompt, according to which I harvested five words, one each from five different poems, and wove a poem around them. Other responses to the prompt may be found here.
My words came from Lia Purpura’s wonderful and quirky new book King Baby: slat, calipers, splinter, dun, and glue-eyed. All five words were present in the first draft of this poem, in the order in which I pulled them from a bag, but “thin slats of their wingbones” didn’t survive the edit.
The walking
stick picks
its way
upside down
along the
underside
of the meadow’s
flowering surface —
goldenrod,
asters,
snakeroot —
a stem
among stems,
stalking just
the right
leaf. When
it reaches
a gap
in the canopy,
it stops
to sway —
a rhythmic
rocking. Then
one spined
twig reaches
for the nearest
likely toehold
& the rest
of it follows,
stretched like
the shadow
of a tree
in winter
across
the glaring
moment of
the sky.
I am yesterday’s news, brittle & sepia’d
by over-exposure. My vivid blues
have turned Gray-Lady gray
& my yellow journaling has curdled
along with the leaves.
It’s the silly season of the soul.
I look for a late daisy to petal-pluck
but find only asters, blue rays
too numerous & disorderly for any kind
of in-depth, katydid-or-didn’t analysis.
The government thunders the fee
fie foe of socialized risk
so gods can go on living in the sky,
go on disemboweling the mountains
for coal to run their air conditioners
& turn their sunlit mansions back
into caves. You don’t need a haruspex
to tell which way the blood flows.
When I came up from the cutting-room floor
last Sunday, my hands were red as lipstick
& stank of the other white meat.
We’ve launched our first monthly contest at Postal Poetry — a sort of high-brow version of that blog staple, the caption contest, but with a choice of ten stunning images to pair your poems with. Rampant nudity is involved.
By the way, for a naked, unpoemed version of the above photo, see Visual Soma.
On a clear afternoon in September,
the hollow bang of hammers on nails
on planks
on studs
on beams
on a foundation
on a hole in the ground
in a clearing in the woods
in a hollow first lumbered 200 years ago
to make charcoal
to forge iron nails
reminds me of the sound the sky makes
whenever it tries to bolt itself to the earth.
If I were to pray, I would start low
in the belly, among the slick viscera —
don’t call them tripe, those amulets,
that conjurer’s bag, the wine-dark
apotrope where I live, & a road
more convoluted than the tube of a tuba,
that’s where I’d start, there where medicine
(always the best laughter) bubbles up
like smoke through a hookah
into the vicinity of my underachieving heart
& the lungs’ bladderwrack, that’s
how I’d begin, letting the first note
climb of its own volition, gathering
strength in the chest before the voice box
warps it into sound & it joins the others,
which were also somehow there already
in the darkness just beyond the fire,
eyes aglint, our unfamiliar better natures,
so unlike the beast that once leapt for my throat
before its too-small owner — our neighbor–
could drag it away, & I walked into the house
holding my bloodied hand before me
like a waiter with a choice dish
(the zig-zag track of the stitches still marks
my ring-finger) but that was the savagery
of an untamed thing confined;
its muffled roars & strangled yelps
as it flung itself all night against the pen
were nothing like the call or response
of an untrammeled spirit, half-laugh, half-sob —
the way I would hope to sound
if ever I were to join the pack & pray.
Download the MP3
(N.B.: The audio is more important to this post than the text!)
The storm jarred me awake at 4:00,
at 4:30, at 5:00 — close strikes
are a fact of life here on the mountaintop.
The lightning came & went, came & went.
When I finally got up,
weariness flooded every muscle,
& I sat on the porch sipping black coffee
& enjoying the Brownian noise
of rain on the roof. The darkness
freed me from the labor of seeing,
the downpour, from listening.
Each flash & boom was painful,
the apparition of trees, yard, porch
all much too brief for my slow pupils
to shrink and take in.
Awakening is rarely a rapid thing;
dawning can’t be rushed.
I’ll admit, though, I pulled my pocket
notebook out & began writing blind —
too risky to go turn the computer on.
When I looked at it later, in the light,
I found I’d underestimated the spaces
between lines: words overlapped
as if on a palimpsest, ballpoint arabesques
interwove like fingers in hair. Flashes, but not of insight,
I appeared to have written. Ark of the Covenant — talking drums —
dyslexia of dark & light.
I am a cipher to myself. At least
the storm passed.
