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Postcard
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126 Postcard for Lynda Hull “Today everything was glazed with ice after a brief thaw then a plunge in temp. So the news was full of spectacular 25 and 40 car smash-ups. Weather & traffic as metaphor ? I won’t touch that one!” —postcard greeting from Lynda Hull 1 Found this message on a postcard from you by accident about a month or so after your death. What did it matter then I’d stuck the card as place marker in a collection of stories? What did it matter then if you’d mailed it from Amsterdam or New Jersey or Chicago? Always in motion, back and forth, faster and faster. That was the danger—so much so soon. One friend, seeing your picture in the paper, mistook your obituary for an announcement you’d won another poetry prize. 2 That line to me about weather and traffic was just a joke—who supposedly knows less 127 about weather than a Southern Californian? And who knows more about traffic than a Los Angeles poet, anyway? And who knew more about death than you, the one who turned away from that follow spot more than once, the chanteuse who stopped shooting her blood full of jazzy soporific juice? Who knew more about flirting with death, kiss-on-the-cheek flirting, and smoky dancing thigh against thigh with it down the chasm of love? 3 Everybody knew it would come, it would come to end you earlier than most, no old woman sitting in a room, dreary on a white-sheeted bed. It would come in high relief, it would come like numbness in a needle, cold as overdose even when you said you weren’t using anymore. It would come because it always comes— just like Chet Baker falling out of that window, just like falling in love with how blood is dark and tasty. It would come because you were a hand-leaving-glove kind of gal, risky as rhinestones before 5:00 p.m. [44.200.82.195] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 17:00 GMT) 128 4 Skinny saint, I would have put some meat on your bones if you had slept with me. But you were my guardian angel and not anywhere near available for lust, not anywhere near available to me since I didn’t need saving, just revising. My belated epitaph comes down to this shambles of intention. I have a postcard from you that set elegy in motion, and it keeps tumbling like a mantra of remembrance or a cajoling spell for more words, more poems as deep and lush as trumpet bells, poems to love for their sheen and tactile intelligence, chiaroscuro in language your métier. 5 Come to your senses, I say. She is dead, and I place that foreign feeling squarely in front of me like the postcard of a room in which the chair of an artist painted by another artist sits empty. ...