The poem
I'm thinking about you. What else can I say? The palm trees on the reverse are a delusion; so is the pink sand. What we have are the usual fractured coke bottles and the smell of backed-up drains, too sweet, like a mango on the verge of rot, which we have also. The air clear sweat, mosquitoes & their tracks; birds & elusive.
Time comes in waves here, a sickness, one day after the other rolling on; I move up, it's called awake, then down into the uneasy nights but never forward. The roosters crow for hours before dawn, and a prodded child howls & howls on the pocked road to school. In the hold with the baggage there are two prisoners, their heads shaved by bayonets, & ten crates of queasy chicks. Each spring there's race of cripples, from the store to the church. This is the sort of junk I carry with me; and a clipping about democracy from the local paper.
Outside the window they're building the damn hotel, nail by nail, someone's crumbling dream. A universe that includes you can't be all bad, but does it? At this distance you're a mirage, a glossy image fixed in the posture of the last time I saw you. Turn you over, there's the place for the address. Wish you were here. Love comes in waves like the ocean, a sickness which goes on & on, a hollow cave in the head, filling & pounding, a kicked ear.
I like the comparison of her lover to a postcard, as well as the restatement of a prior section at the end of the poem.
i like the way she compares the her love as waves. as in it goes and comes in different strengths
Wowww,
Miss Atwood is a complete savage champion she does good symbolism i like the lover compared to the postcard symbolism and then i like too the other uses of the symbolic meaning of the postcard like when the lover guy dies and t hen the postcard falls like down way back in the day.