Postcards

How to use this old technology of the postcard, with its marriage of image and text, its insistence that every exchange has two-sides which can never be considered at the same time, to write oneself back into the world? The traveller alights in Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, even in Canada, finding words for the old wounds, sitting for a portrait in the middle of the city, out of doors, alone in a crowd. The military ghosts are never far, their costumes barely able to cover up the casual brutalities, even as the city’s citizens come together in unexpected formations, inventing new lives and conversations, like the plant life that flourishes around them, as resplendent as weeds. One of his most perfect and most personal reflections, a letter from the heart.