but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation, that forces us to sing our songs in little rooms or pour our sentiments into measuring cups.
We write on the back of a waterfall or lake, adding to the view a caption as conventional as an Elizabethan woman’s heliocentric eyes.
We locate an adjective for the weather.
We announce that we are having a wonderful time. We express the wish that you were here
and hide the wish that we were where you are, walking back from the mailbox, your head lowered as you read and turn the thin message in your hands.
A slice of this place, a length of white beach,
a piazza or carved spires of a cathedral
will pierce the familiar place where you remain,