Postcards Home
Accommodations
he sees a fractured Picasso,
all those lines and brittle angles,
those accommodations.
Up before dawn, he exercises
so he can bend to stroke the deaf dog,
to cue her when he walks to another room,
perhaps the kitchen,
or today he might leave the house,
change the air filter in his sister’s
ceiling (she has balance issues),
shop for liquid soap or toilet paper
for his mother who can’t remember
his name.
Tomorrow
he’ll fish with his grandson
who flew across five states
for a forty-six -hour visit,
but he has to share the boy
with his ex-wife
who has a swimming pool and floats
filled with the passive aggressive
breath of her anger, so
he’ll probably only get five hours.
Nothing ever quite fits.
He wonders if he can break apart
the jagged pieces of his life,
mosaic them into some kind of whole,
build a work of art from shards.
“In Postcards Home, Dede Fox invites us to thumb through a photo album of favorite places and compelling images, some from Texas and others further afield. Poem by poem, we introduced to remarkable characters in situation we recognize as our own. With photographic clarity, her reflections of loving, losing, living and believing, like her title poem, remind us that all journeys lead home.”
—Anne McCrady
“Fox’s poetic canvas is vast, deftly painted with an array of dazzling colors. The subjects of her poems are as intriguingly eclectic as her spot-on allusions. She writes of family, travel, the joy of perception and reflection, the arts and the facets of her Jewish heritage, and she does so with an ease of diction which belies the consummate poetic skill subtly manifest in each and every poem.”
—Larry D. Thomas, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate