. . . . .

postcard: Bread Loaf

(wet ampersand)

***

Out of Love for the Gesture That is a Poem a House Tries to Anthropomorphize

A house beside a freeway on the fault of America
is one lonely place. To change the vibration, accept
the metaphor. Let the poem expose its credentials.
It is not treason to allow the object to act as if human,
but smugly "non-western." A C-O-W-B-O-Y wrangles
errant ontologies. A C-O-W-B-O-Y wants to go home
to her house beside a freeway on the fault of America
and read a poem that ends like this: and that is how
I learned to love the impossible. To change the vibration,
a house must stop blaming America for its neediness,
for being such a constant bore about it all, as though
there is nothing else to speak of. When a gesture
outlasts the weather and no one notices, that is America--
one lonely place to be impossible, adrift as a poem.

Wendy S. Walters, Birds of Los Angeles

***