Reanimated Lavender Granola Switchblade Nun rides again.

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Post Card

I wonder if this is normal?
If you were here, you would not care that the sheets were plain.
You would hold up your finger,
gently, testing me for concussion
and you would find me to be the same as I ever was--

unable to name the date, the address of this hotel,
or the President of the United States, but I never could anyway.
Oh, love of my heart,
he can't close such unhurried lips around that finger--
let alone each one in turn as the windows turn coral, then azure.

Where did you go?
I must have fallen asleep, and when I was awakened
by the hotel doctor and the day shift desk clerk,
you had gone. "Who?" they ask. "Who?'
Beautiful One, I can't remember your name--forgive me!
But I remember your bare hip, the rise and dip that God Herself envies.

I was made to leave the hotel, and the emergency room as well.
I bought a post card with a dollar I found nested in mud
beside a building in an unfamiliar neighborhood.
My hand, the one you held, the one you kissed and guided
between your legs as you spoke my name,

stopped, palsied, when I tried to address the card for you.
Where do you live? What is the name of the street
where you watch, every morning, the windows turning coral, then saffron?
How much postage will carry my heart to you, immediately?
Why can't I remember anything, darling, except that moment when I was happy,

as you stretched out, soft-skinned on top of me
and I knew everything, and nothing, and loved you so much?
_________

for "Kerry Says: Let's Send A Post Card" at Real Toads.  

9 comments:

  1. How amazing, heartbreaking, breathtaking, sexytendertouching. I truly adore this.

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  2. No one writes love better than you. This is so sad and wonderful........the memory of love in the aging heart and mind that is losing its way. Sigh. Perfection. I love love LOVE it.

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  3. Love this, Shay. This strikes a cord with most of us I do believe. Not even Facebook can find my lovely one. I did find her brother once, though. At a Welcome Station at the Missouri line.
    ..

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  4. Love can indeed steal everything, our identities, our memories and leave us homeless on the streets of our life trying to grasp what we have lost--this is both disturbingly intense and softly plaintive and musical. I love every word, but especially the last three stanzas. How much postage, what address--when the only meaningful details that remain are those last two lines.

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  5. Well, Shay, I guess you and the postal service have walked a mile or two together... It shows because this is utterly beautiful, and heart-breaking. You have captured something of the vulnerability that comes of opening oneself to another, the uncertainty if this feeling, or bond, will last beyond a single day, or for a lifetime. You have also evoked something of those vintage times in your descriptions of setting and character.
    Just marvellous work, and a pure pleasure to read.

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  6. The last ten lines--especially--make me swoon.

    Gorgeous.

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  7. Every line, pure lusciousness! (is that a word?)

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