The Post Office of Souls

 

At the Post Office of Souls, there's a late letter

and the hand that wrote it is the hand that delayed it.

The sorting machines are made of jacaranda and white iris--

only the postmistress is fully automated, an Egypto-Mechan perfect fit.

Stamps roll out from dreams and are hard to remember.

Women hired to sleep them also catalog--they are pregnant with postage

and have your address on file, a complete roster of your life in miniature.

They deliver you, cradle you, sing you on through to your dotage.

The aisles are of indigo water mermaid clerks circulate under

estimate arrival times, currents, allowing for windage and mercurial local poohbahs.

Open an envelope, catch the scent of lilacs, bribe Anubis with a kiss

and receive safe passage, receipt of contents, S.W.A.K and certified, you cannot lose us.

________

for Dverse "Compound Me." I have used "underestimate."

In The Birch Forest

In the birch forest,

my lazy sister poses as a river.

In her hair, rims of ice 

where she runs an orphanage for birch leaves.

The chill black water is God's mustache.

He has crows for barbers

and my sister is His postmistress.

A workman carries in his sack

things said to his wife,

a few hours from a week in July,

and a small statue of St. Joseph.

His train will come soon, smelling of hay fields and lady slippers.

People say to me, is that your sister?

We invite them to stay, but they fade as we forget them.

Papa arrives home in the winter.

He is the Northern Lights, we are belled reindeer.

As Russian Orthodox,

we celebrate Christmas in January and Easter out of doors.

Papa carries my mother's lost babies in his work sack

where they turn into inked letters.

His love is their postage,

my sister their patroness.

Once each year they return, with ice in their hair,

to sit by July and remark how his whiskers look like birches in the breeze 

when he sees them, and smiles.

________

obligatory link back to Dverse OLN.