La Poste

First there was that letter sent from Paris
for a long lost friend in a gardened city,
blue ink wrapped in cheap French stationery
with a bookmark, a street flyer with a copied recipe
and excess postage, just to be sure.
Undelivered.

Then that postcard sent from Madrid
for the girl who loved dusty shelves and tall bridges,
drippy spanish verses scribbled behind
an image of a full-mooned night by the Gran Vía
posted on a half-mooned night by the Gran Vía.
Undelivered.

Then there was that letter from Delhi
addressed to an ashen avenue in Strasbourg,
musing on Mallarmé's swan and Iberian sands,
violins, baguettes and the ironies of horology,
the nightly reveries of a wintry summer.
Undelivered.

***

It never goes away,
the inky grief of an undelivered letter,
like a lost pet from childhood.

It lingers like an unrecallable dream,

the shadow of all those lost words

huddled somewhere in unwilling silence,

perhaps
gathering dust in an office crevice,
or in a stranger's shoebox,
or crumpled behind a dumpster
or floating out at sea, the moist ink slowly fraying

like blue veins hurtling into heartless oblivion.