The next one is a story poem.
There was a news story I read, about a couple
of women travelers, who were vacationing in Montana
37 years ago.
They sent a postcard back to their friends
in the East in Ohio.
It had a picture of the Montana State map.
It finally reached its destination this summer,
which in some ways doesn't surprise me
for those of us who live in Northwestern Montana
and watch things happen very slowly,
it seemed like a sort of timely delivery.
There's a lesson-- if you're going
to live in a rural Western place,
patience is not only a virtue, but a necessity.
Lost Postcard-- we enjoyed our cross country train ride
and saw a mule deer somewhere along the way, wrote Polly.
And the postcard made its way, pristine, not even
tattered at the edges, among the bitter route
and the bare grass, traveling by itself
among glacier lilies and Oregon grape,
pausing a year or two in an Aspen Grove,
and then stuffed by some board mail carrier
into a magpies nest.
When the wind blew it into a Tamarac Grove, and then a bride
on her last walk, before the wedding,
lifted it and tucked it into a corner of her mirror
where it remained above cut glass, perfume bottles
and stray hairpins for 11 years.
It flew with the mayfly hatch above immigrant weeds.
Oh finch, oh fireweed, you have seen the postcard.
Yarrow, arrowroot, the letters resemble your curled leaves,
is the color of the state map, the hue
of in October sunset over whitefish lake.
A stranger in her loose bib overalls
wanders the backyard, cursing the garden weeds.
An expert on outhouses and salty language,
she tends to her llamas in Hudson, Ohio.
And at her rusted mailbox, the Montana postcard,
it's greeting from Polly and friend,
having traveled 37 years, finally arrives.
And so she adds it to her outrageous postcard collection,
pondering the mystery of loss.