114 Postcards

I just counted them. They are all faces of writers, artists and a few actors all looking down in my direction. Also Einstein, Billie and Duke and there’s Seeger and Guthrie. All pinned to a corkboard the length of my writing room.

I’m listening to an on-going conversation and perhaps a lost chord hoping to pick up a dropped pearl of wisdom. In any case I enjoy their company. They nudge me now and then. It’s almost like having a dinner party without having to cook.

Charles and Ray Eames are riding a bicycle built for two. Nabokov looks like he’s flying a kite or is that a balloon. It couldn’t be a butterfly net. Thomas Wolfe is getting on a bus. Maybe he just dropped off a few thousand pages on Max Perkin’s desk.

Kafka looks like he is on trial for God only knows what. Einstein is having a good hair day all things being relative. Keats and Yeats are negotiating to have their names rhyme. There’s Marilyn Monroe next to Emily Dickinson. They are giggling in girl talk.

Henry and William do not look like the brothers James but Camus, Chagall and Bogey appear to be related. Plath and Sexton seem happy enough to go on.

Pete and Woody are trying to overcome what Robeson couldn’t. Ellington is taking the A train and Chet Baker is blowing his heart out. That other Woody (Allen) is still not dead…maybe the only one alive in the gallery. He always said he didn’t want to be around when it happens.

I’d love to hear what Charles Bukowski has to say to Coleridge on the road to Xanadu. Eliot looks like he’s been etherized upon a table and Pound has a feral look like he was just uncaged. Sontag of all people is posed like an odalisque.

Dylan Thomas, without a drink, resembles Orson Welles and a thin Orson Welles is a dead ringer for Citizen Kane.

And there is Rin-Tin-Tin or possibly Meryl Streep in her greatest role.

How can I be expected to write a blog with so many eyes on me?