Postcards


One hour available and logic flies around the room, buzzing crazily, and lights on the window blinds. It is the only thing standing between me and just playing the keyboards with wild abandon and so I roll up a magazine and kill it. I stand stupidly staring at the smear where organized matter used to fly around like a little organic helicopter. I look out the window and there is a very large finger pointing from the sky. There is a rubber band wrapped across the end of it, stretched backward into unbearable tension by the principle of the opposing thumb and forefinger. I never thought it would end this way.

I blink a couple of times and realize it’s just storm clouds rolling across the mile high Arizona mountains. They are one artistic element in a great exanse of land and sky. The sky is boiling with storms and sunshine and rainbows and cloudscapes. August is the monsoon season in Prescott. One more day for my collection.

Days are like postcards, and the similar ones go on the same revolving rack. This one is stormy skies and the smell of rain. When I was 21 I was a photographer here, and I used to photograph these skies. I carried a case full of lenses, and I liked to lay down under the high jump with a .21mm lens and compose art from sports. I like to compress elements together with telephotos.

Other days are singled out by some emotional awakening, or wounding. A love affair begins, or it ends. A man is killed in a shootout and I am standing over him, taking a picture of him with half his head blown away. I am amazed that his body is still living. He is still breathing. But Danny Lee Eckard is a dead man in the frame of the camera.

There are the days which are singled out as erotic postcards, and put in the back room in a special section, so the children won’t be looking at them. They would have no frame of reference, one would hope. It would confuse them. I am not sure how to feel about the size of the inventory in the back section. I have noticed two men in ill fitting suits snooping around. I think they are investigators. All they ever actually purchase is Gatorade and Prylosec.

Some cards aren’t displayed, even in the back section. They are locked away in a private vault, and are available only by appointment. They depict wounds that never heal. They are only contained in artwork driven by despair and the passion which defends the boundaries of the body from hopelessness.

And then there is the humor section. There is movie dialogue, there are passages from books, jokes, and remembered laughter. Humor is the shirt of chain mail that protects Grendel in the deep. It is the gift we give our children as we release them into a history of violence and murder, love and redemption. I choose a card at random.

I see a face that was once my lover’s face, and I wonder where she went away to, so long ago. I only glance at it and then put it back. There is nobody to send it to. There is the scent of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee from the kitchen, and the sound of the grandfather clock in the hall, as the pendulum swings the hour away.

I know that I can’t escape into creative fantasy forever. I’ll need some logic, even if it does make that interminable droning noise.

Posted: Thu - August 11, 2005 at 11:33 AM