PostCcards #4! / by Nathan Webster

During this time of distance, I felt it could be helpful to share entries from collaborators from all over the world, to help our readers out of their personal space and into someone else's. I created this series because I have been looking for inspiration and connection and know I am not alone.

Friends are sharing an image of themselves… the space that they occupy most these days or a moment, landscape, piece, book, view, thing, dream or simply something keeping them inspired, optimistic and sane.

Charlotte


Today’s generous contributor is: architect/educator Chris Taylor - based in Lubbock, Texas.

Chris shared images from his life and the preface to William Carlos Williams book length poem Paterson.

Preface 

"Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty 
when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance?" 

To make a start, 

put of particulars 

and make them general, rolling 

up the sum, by defective means — 

Sniffing the trees, 

just another dog 

among a lot of dogs. What 

else is there? And to do? 

The .rest-have run out — 

after the rabbits. 

Only the lame stands— on 

three legs. Scratch front and back. 

Deceive and eat. Dig 

a musty bone 

- 

For the beginning is assuredly 

the end — since we know nothing, pure 

and simple, beyond 

our own complexities. 

Yet there is 
no return: rolling up out of chaos, 
a nine months' wonder, the city 
the man, an identity — it can't be 
otherwise — an 

interpenetration, both ways. Rolling 

3 


up! obverse, reverse; 

the drunk the sober; the illustrious 

the gross; one. In ignorance 

a certain knowledge and knowledge, 

undispersed, its own undoing. 

(The multiple seed, 
packed tight with detail, soured, 
is lost in the flux and the mind, 
distracted, floats off in the same 
scum) 

Rolling up, rolling up heavy with 
numbers. 

It is the ignorant sun 
rising in the slot of 
hollow suns risen, so that never in this 
world will a man live well in his body 
save dying — and not know himself 
dying; yet that is 
the design. Renews himself 
thereby, in addition and subtraction, 
walking up and down. 

and the craft, 
subverted by thought, rolling up, let 
him beware lest he turn to no more than 
the writing of stale poems . . . 
Minds like beds always made up, 

(more stony than a shore) 
unwilling or unable. 



Rolling in, top up, 
under, thrust and recoil, a great clatter: 
lifted as air, boated, multicolored, a 
wash of seas — 

from mathematics to particulars- 
divided as the dew, 
floating mists, to be rained down and 
regathered into a river that flows 
and encircles: 

shells and animalcules 
generally and so to man, 



to Paterson.