Richard Freed: Postcards from Noordwijk

POSTCARDS FROM NOORDWIJK

I want you to know that I am eating my three meals

breakfast, dinner and mini-bar, though today

I began the mini-bar second, not wanting

to leave for dinner before calling

There will be no sunset today

Yesterday the sky blazed ochre

but without you, save these poems

II.

On Dutch TV is the "Adult Entertainment Network"

with ads for phone sex, bordellos and attire

I watched a show about making videos, especially

those involving the "double play"

which doesn't, by the way, include anything oral

Between shootings, the female directs the where and how much

and one of the two men explains the need to be kind to the girl

He is now also a director, with respect he'd never imagined

when he was just a porn star

III.

In Noordwijk an Zee my nightly resolutions

blather in the morning's regret

building again like the tide and waiting

for tomorrow, fresh with dune grass

I am only held by your heart

like a dark planet around an orange sun

Richard Freed

RICHARD C. FREED is a professor in the Iowa State University English Department's program in Rhetoric and Professional Communication. He is an international consultant on proposal writing and author of The Variables of Composition, which won NCTE's best book award for research in scientific and technical communication, and Writing Winning Business Proposals, forthcoming in a 2nd edition from McGraw-Hill. Most recently, he has co-produced The Grants Workbench, the first web-based application that structures a writer's thinking and generates the first draft of a grant proposal, available at http://www.winningproposal.com. Freed is the Chief Executive Officer of WinningProposal.com.