SUNDAY POEMS
For my SUNDAY POEMS entry on August 3 last year I posted eight short poems which I collectively titled “Postcard Poems” (here). I’m continuing that collection, with the idea of creating a book that tells a story of a man’s life through the postcards he writes. Right now, I’m writing, revising, discarding, and organizing the poems, though I have a long way to go before I can confidently say I’ve achieved the book I have in my head.
All that is by way of preface to this week’s SUNDAY POEMS post. The first set of postcard poems were numbered 1-8. This set features 9-18, though that’s a tentative numbering system since I will probably end up reordering what exists currently as I write new poems and eliminate others. I’m sharing these with you in part because it allows you to see where a project like this one starts.
If all goes well, in a few months time I should have a final draft of my proposed book, although one without the illustrated postcards (each one containing one of the poems) I plan to use as the pages of the book. That’s a challenge I will confront once I have the final poems selected and organized in the proper order.
In the meantime, here’s the next batch of postcard poems.
Postcard #9 This pond is the purest one on the Cape, the woman told me. You can see the bottom. I’d given her hitchhiking daughter a ride and my reward was dinner and a place to pitch my tent for the night. I woke early and drove off to find coffee. I never saw the bottom of that pond. Postcard #10 I’m a stranger among these strangers, all the locals gathered for this annual display. We’ve seen our share of pyrotechnics, haven’t we? Standing on this balcony, I’m thinking of the time we climbed on your parents’ roof and you nearly fell off when the grand finale kicked in. Postcard #11 Fog is curling across this lake. I can’t see the other shore. Postcard #12 Driving across the Mackinac Bridge I thought about the time that island disappeared and a pair of loons searched for one another, calling out through the thick, chilly gray while I warmed my hands over a sputtering flame, the wood we’d gathered the night before damp in dawn’s early light. No one knew where we were. Neither did we. Postcard #13 It’s time to come home. That’s what you said when I called from a pay phone in Provincetown. I knew you were right. What was I doing out here so far away and alone? It was only later I realized, no matter the distance, every traveler travels alone. Postcard #14 The fragrance of sage, eucalyptus, and laurel, the bright spot bursts of poppies and bougainvillea. That’s what I remember. Outside that funky Westwood hotel, you wore a yellow dress that swayed as palm leaves clattered in the August air. That was love like I’d never known before. I could have stayed there with you forever. Postcard #15 In Colorado anything seemed possible, though none of us knew what to do. Our futures were as shrouded as the mountain pass that forced us to spend the night in the town that Coors built. We bought some and drank it in a motel room we could barely afford, never dreaming that Lou Gehrig was lurking a little further down the road. Postcard #16 Outside Naples the Gates of Hell stood open near the hotel where we sat drinking wine on a cool spring evening after traveling for hours to get there. Twenty years on and we were still holding hands. Postcard #17 Topanga Canyon rose and fell like the waves a few miles west. We’d washed up there, two wanderers following the undulating road, snaking our way toward a valley of dreams. Every bob and weave our stomachs dropped and you clutched your seat, asking how far to our destination. Postcard #18 Waking this morning in another room in another place I’d prefer not to be my first thought was of you, the New Year’s dance we shared while waves kissed a Bahamian beach.