Four Postulates

for Anselm Hollo I what is most valued, the cherished things any moment in Iowa settles so carelessly upon you—cat stickers, a coded signal Home Orange Juice is trucking by, some morning or any day when winter spring summer and the poem begin again II who was it started laughing? someone otherwise somber, the Christmas lariateer spinning double circles, dancing through the lasso at his side, bullwhipping cigarettes from his lovely assistant’s scarlet mouth every hour on the hour next to the howling Santa Claus III would have thought other- wise, conceded the point at first argument; of course there were mornings, the hills went on to Cedar Rapids and Davenport; in its own season the corn’s pollen stung another hand; brown rivers paled with ice; those were the truck washes we had known before, the spit of gravel from the humming wheels; the patient customer of truck stops knows the best of these returns, hulks them into the dark of his coffee with rounded shoulders and extended forearms IV it is the line of force or the vector that sees us through our ambiguities, diagram of rivers, path the semi takes among its various winds, turn the night makes at a neon sign, EATS, locus of all points on the lasso’s rim, itself remembered; somehow each of us knows the double twist of brittle fiber that holds the line together, knows the turns the rain takes, heaves the long land rests against our feet