Poetry | January 01, 1988
A Postcard in Memory of Donald Evans
Robert Farnsworth
Walking past a boatyard full of cradled sloops
last night, I thought of you. Yellow portholes
yielded the shoulders of somebody doing delicate
work, floating perhaps, above a coast he hopes
he will explore, or stilting his compass across
the pale deeps. Three just-varnished blocks
beaded a rope across the cockpit. In the flat
surrounding fields, luminous local vegetables
hide beneath dark leaves, and on the pier at
evening, thousands of red-needled sea urchins,
swung from a trawler’s hold, pour loudly
into a truck. But the stolid, mumbling, upwind
flight of the blimp each morning most brings
you to mind – outward bound for Nadorp,
Iles des Sourds, Mangiare. Most of your countries
had just achieved independence, or had steadily
reclaimed themselves from cold ocean and sky.
They linger at the margins of our maps.
Cancelled on yellowed envelopes, or fixed
like stars to black collector sheets, tinctured
in the watercolor you said could not be labored,
their stamps commemorate our love of minor
beauties, perishable things. In the full panes
of your exotic issues, made of tiny, certain strokes
and pastel fogs, I recognize myself, the boy
who wanted everything arrayed, passed through
imagination’s tender lens, orderly as the leaded
green and mustard meadows tilting on a wingtip,
where long archipelagos of shadows slowly drift.
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