LAST POSTCARD   (for Ted Lapp, 1904 - 1987)   
   
In a condominium mail box,   
bundled among phone bill and grocery flyer,   
a postcard from India of the Taj Mahal.   
 Snow sparkles the street as  I collect the card,    
using my father’s key.    He’d have liked the colors in it -
creamy white, rose and teal.  They’d have cheered him   
 at the end of his illness, a winter of blizzards.

Dad longed to visit that monument to devoted love,
but for curries and unrefrigerated meats, sure
 to have thrown his digestion into spasms,
he who always wiped off silverware in restaurants.
 
The card’s sender was a neighbor,
 generations younger,
who loved birds and wild beasts
 as much as Dad did.  Tom’s card
 arrived almost in time for him to see it.

 Instead, I read it aloud to him,
 departed just a few days before
 from this earth with its mixed wonders,
  cathedrals of Europe he loved, ruined in war,
  visited by him as an officer, and years later,
  beaches of Aruba & Jamaica where he dined
  on conch soup and beer,  quoting Whitman
 in a postcard to me:

 "I loaf and invite my soul,
I lean and loaf at my ease."




Claudia Lapp
2009