Postcards

POSTCARDS DAVID STEINGASS 1 Jimmy you sent hokey Disneycolor postcards one caption said WHERE ARE YOUR CHILDREN PLAYING THE PIANO PAYS DIVIDENDS IN FAMILY FUN AND BLESSED COMFORT: save this as a prescription you wrote against heartbreak and the shot of one lonely brown Packard sedan parked off angle in birch trees before a Lolita-motel in Marquette Mich and Mark Twain in heroic bronze: not the beloved American who said "I never met a man I didn 't like" you and I know postcards are an artform of the 60s cryptic notes passed to the 70s You loved to read in the toilet Plymptons sport fantasies jock-y beavershooting yukyuk talk Kerouac the smallest mags ever heard of full of your friends poems all morning you could disappear in there! you big galoot youd call me when you came back there cant be more than 4 more in this century can use that word they have names like Tweed Mummert and live nowhere near Milwaukee big galoot you said and I believed it Your poems are delicate the way a poems always the squash blossom popped out of manure one about a pine tree so snow covered it looks like a little girl wearing a ghost sheet at Halloween another about lying in a snowy field a freezing Wisconsin winter night blinking at crisp stars making snow angels crystal moths 53 in the luminous dark it makes me cry it doesnt matter you say over & over in the book and over we spun it smooth I knew just what mattered how she gleamed and where We ate buffalo elk & moose one night you showed the little skulls (rat squirrel rabbit one owl) you kept on your writing table gleaming neat as model planes youd just heard you have no father or the one youd thought is a dud all that love and pure hate you muttered your heart fluttered from arsenic laced grass they pumped your belly & you howled father father all right thrashing in terror when I told you I wanted to be an orange crate magnet when I grew up (collect each different one for the way it holds air its feel & uselessness) it was real when I met the girl who brought the moose foot from Alaska last summer a prize like the juke record of Teddy Mr Bojangles dog cording to The Old Rugged Cross dancing off to death over Im in Spain pulling ticks big as raisins off a street dog named Dylan thinking of my godchild your daughter by that singers name when I came I said Sue its a girl I know I saw the Zen moment out side myself I brought a teething ring of ivory from a horse harness to her christening its lines stood out like whorls on babies fingertips Id riveted a leather fob to it & she sucked it whole unsterilized grinning Jimmy 4 years since I saw your face this poems for you your insomnia blackened eye craters your dear frantic bones dying beneath your eyes taking flight in flame I bet_you like this part best its short 54 was wrote in one shot like THE SUBTERRANEANS matters more than what comes before because its last and doesnt matter at all CHARLES VANDERSEE LITTLE PLACES In the little magazines, someone is always attacking someone else, which is very nice. -Robert BIy In the little countries somebody is always attacking somebody else, usually with a land mine or famine. With sharp muffled syllables or silence, like the collapse of embassy panes onto sills and raked gravel and down to the dusty, bloody leaves in pools. In the little prisons, with nineteen hundred, not the anomie of two thousand, somebody is always attacking anybody else handy, with papers, fists, feces, unpronounceable numbers, and wrong colors, figuring the enemy is somebody. After a time the pulp ferments vigorously and tear gas is added. 55 ...