Postcard

The postcard arrived on Thursday;
I remember the day because I had forgotten to
put out the garbage the day before,
which was Wednesday.
The mailman handed me the packet of
mail and smiled as he told me that it looked
like I had a postcard today.
It’s a remarkable day to have a postcard,
or anything written by the human hand, from a place
that you can picture in your mind, not
a nameless postal center in a Midwestern town
that offered a tax break to a distribution center,
or a piece of mail that has no return address.
The handwriting, so forcefully familiar, the
carefully formed letters describing
her perfectly typical day so many miles
from here in a place where clouds
dare to hover so tenaciously.
Two colors of ink, one bleeding into the
other and I imagine her tossing the pen
which gave up into the trash bin with
a dismissive snort; she tells me she has come
to appreciate my love of pens.
The other side of the card is a reproduction
of a gardener tending his seedlings, each
of them holding a small fountain pen.