A Postcard in Memory of Donald
Evans
~ Robert
Farnsworth, The Missouri Review (Vol. 11, No.1, 1988)
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.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
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3 comments:
Wow - beautiful images!
Hello Jack,
Do you have the book "The world of Donald Evans"?
Ruud Janssen
Hiya
go here for a beautiful Evans stamp from Iles des Sourds
http://vleeptronz.blogspot.com/2009/08/change-is-bad-its-all-your-fault.html
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