A Postcard in Memory of Donald Evans

A POSTCARD IN MEMORY OF DONALD EVANS / Robert Farnsworth 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. 56 · The Missouri Review ...