Postcards
She sends me postcards
when she could just as easily email.
I like to think that it’s an appeal to my sensibilities:
the uncommonness of a card
popping out of my mailbox
as opposed to one more missive
in a clogged in-box,
And, of course,
there’s always the photograph on the front
to amuse with its humour
or awe with beauty
or historical resonance.
And there’s the handwriting itself—
so distinctive
it couldn’t be the hand of anyone else.
One glimpse of her tidy scrawl
and I can imagine her
seated at a table in a small French cafe,
writing down her observations
in between sips of espresso.
An email
could just as easily have been composed
and sent
from the next room.
And I won’t even start on
the sheer uniqueness
of the spittle on
the back of that stamp
being hers and hers alone.
OK, I will.
There’s DNA all over this postcard.
And it’s hers, not Google’s.
Yes, it was a week getting here.
But I have always had a soft spot
for the time it takes.
The Book on My Shelf I’ve Never Read
I can read it
without knowing what’s in it.
Sailors roll dice with princesses.
Communists duel existentialists.
A man from 18th-century Madrid
pops up in a Greenwich Village bar
with Dylan wailing songs he hasn’t written yet.
And sometimes even, a woman falls in love
with a pebble in the palm of a heartbeat’s hand.
Book and non-reader,
we stare across the room at each other,
binding to binding.
It shines like a tale
known only to itself.
I grin like the rest of the story.
How to Reach a Decision
Set out early in the morning.
Dress in warm clothes.
Bring along a flask of coffee
and a bagel to nibble on the way.
Make good time,
but don’t break any laws of the road.
You don’t want to be
stopped by cops.
Take a bathroom break if you have to,
but, other than that,
just keep moving.
Listen to a classic rock station.
But not talk radio.
They could reach a decision for you.
And this is supposed to be yours.
For you’re the driver, aren’t you.
It’s your vehicle.
Your hands on the wheel.
Your foot on the accelerator.
Way back there in the distance
is one thing you could have done.
Way back there is its opposite.
You’re putting as many miles
between them and you
as you possibly can.
But remember—
the world is round.
A Woman Paints at the Seashore
Sand and wave and gull
fill the woman’s canvas.
That’s all she sees.
But I imagine shipwrecks,
drownings.
I plead in silence—
please leave room for the brutality.
Her colours are too pleased with themselves
to encompass all the fishermen gone under.
Her brush is too bright for the depths.
It’s a charming piece, I admit
and will sell to an undiscerning tourist
at one of those stalls off the boardwalk.
If I were the artist,
I’d daub the scene
in blacks and greys.
The last boat in would pivot,
spear into the waters.
There’d be two dark eyes
peering at me from the wave-washed deck,
a skeletal grimace
bent over the wheel.
But she seems happy enough
with the way the work is going.
If I was ever happy enough,
I’d reckon my work was done.
«قراءة ذات صلة» POEMS BY OLIVIA HAJIOFF: The Child Within, These Kids on Their Phones, Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden»
image: بيكساباي
