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Excerpts from Letters To Early Street
La Alameda Press, 2007
LETTER ONE
Dear Demian, this
is not the first one or even the beginning—
Early Street doesn't have a when.
It doesn't begin, "Perhaps I shall practice being
dead to the world..." How dead to the world of
sensation, thought, idea is—I am not my idea
so perhaps I shall practice being
dead to the world—word, which is all idea, as one
practices knitting, guitar, medicine, or poetry
for that matter an unattached ecstatic
rather affectionately yours.
For Halloween I am spirit dressed up as matter, dead
to the world of sensation (lank, bristling,
vacantly quenched.)
I discover letter one will not escape
its singularity, the womb
looms always in my yearning. This
is the thought I'm not and yet I write
with craving—a watershed, a womb, a wreath
of manzanita at my finger tips. There is ink
in the wreath of manzanita scrawling
upon the clouds who blur up the sweat drenched sun—
now just a pile of weepy ash defining the wind, masked
as your thinking, the womb. So everyday I practice
this knitting with flame—ice-skate across eyeballs, strum
the double yellow lines strung
across Early Street'1s duel string asphalt guitar—
nurtured by this absence of when
the song reveals how it doesn't begin
or end with being dead to sensation's wind.
LETTER EIGHT
Dear air,
I will never forget how being saturated
in your declarations keeps me expansive & meanderable—
the ephemerality of letters staked out in the clouds
our felt gown in flames, the orange one I wear here on earth
breathing forth multiple enigmas twice a moment.xWinds
are the first powers to be addressed in any ceremony.
It only seems fitting for without,
our lungs would shrivel—
hello hollow income whole I borrow
space —O great permeable one, breathe out
here on the page between lines, would you? I
will step aside, I will go away, I
will become uninvasive in the air above Early Street.
How those winds at our finger tips hold us to the sky.
Such luminosity is within the general sweep of heart
that comes uncontested with a deep breath.
LETTER TWENTY EIGHT
Dear Early Street, dear darkening ground,
The text of your unfolding
is written in our walking.
Your path is urban boulevard
and deer trail all the same—
where taxicab and insect
segment intersect.
This road is the unread
word of our wandering—
each distance breeds a deeper
solitude, each curve a meeting
with ourselves.
LETTER THIRTY
Dear Stone,
I feel your billion year old Agrillitic heart tick hard
into one damp palm. What a wonder time
bringing you here from the suave Mohave
into this thin hand of shadowed awe.
I see your stiff face accurately drawn
with premonitions of landscapes & beings
yet to come. Who knows of what
colors then by now; pupil depth
black drops, tough mauves, charred orange
rust reds, delicate desert browns all woven
together via threads of lit silver. Articulations
of color drawn with fire:
A 17th century Japanese seascape woodcut print,
a decaying Redwood snag, the silhouette
of a man standing agaze in the soft desert dawn.
Over a billion years drawn this
floral matrix of chemistry—fire spoken
into stone the hand of lightning sketching
our future visions, time sucked out of itself
transparent against the mirror of creation
burning ancient presence—eye
to air & back these great costumes of fire we wear.
LETTER THIRTY THREE
Dear Demian,
These last few letters are trying
too hard toward capsule—poems
in the small town where I live.
Brash, unexpected, compellingly floral—
A roadside vendor selling double yellow lines through
Either of two layers of white matter in the cerebrum.
I can’t decide which to take
With me into this next life
Either of two, or neither of both,
Which fit in a compact detachable receptacle
Bound for the Persian Gulf.
I love you more than the sprawl of veins.
These lit birds here make a glad land.
I can hear the music of her tears
From across the freeway the Adriatic sea.
Early Street has run this way—
The repetitive pronoun is loose on the small town
Where I live killing certain unwalked dogs—
On the same street where Henry Vaughn sheds his fleshly dress,
It’s 1650, no it’s 1999—complete with no parts of body
Like the massacred ones.
Why does the word sacred inhabit massacred?
Wits are impatient insects
In the small town where I live.
And this on me one lettered breath
Let me die before my death.
LETTER FIFTY FOUR
Dear Demian, this
is not the last one or even the beginning
Early Street doesn’t have an end
or even a when—
for all the pulpy tundra’s teeth are agape
with gaps. Snow drifts in
between them teeth to the heated mouth.
Where in the beginning it is found never ends,
the end ever ending is all busied & bruised—
I find me to be my own brazen druid acolyte
one minute picking blueberries
in the Schwangunks, the next spasmodically thriving
off the absence of actuality.
I am equipped with more facades
than a fake mining town.
There is a fake mining town
roaming around in my head right now.
I feel I must change my bonnet mid nod,
now I nod off often into exotic war zones—
the wars in the papers are an erogenous zone.
I am in love with all of the above
I am in love with the ‘it’ of “It’s raining”
you in the muggy midst, my nights of thin sleep
scant trains, midtown canyon thunderstorms—
each sheet between us is a blank star
our love, it bleats in silver carbonated blots
I feel closer to you, my angelic blank star
as affectionately detached as a well fed cat.
Presence as condiment—my face against the window
feeding off the able blend
of morning light on 49th street.
Robins and sparrows in the sumac trees
between brick buildings,
a two call crow and a Skil saw—
I must be in the country the city the same
elusive thing—here where my dying
elders embers are, my darlings
we busy sponging the receding light
where the thoughts foam up
and disperse at once, and I
into a born-again invertebrate ink spot,
a great floral stain
on the pulpy tundra’s teeth.
I smile as only a hand can smile,
with these letters in hand, in tooth
on my way to the post box, the hat box,
the box of rain on the stoop
overflowing with this song of how it doesn’t begin
or end with being married to sensation’s wind.
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