By Dan Veach

Return to Cinder

Nature is a Heraclitean Fire
  —Gerard Manley Hopkins

Mail strike, and the Italian Post

is buried like Pompeii.

On the evening news, dispirited

Post officers kick listlessly

through the mountains and foothills

of the undelivered. 

Will it be cheaper, they wonder

to shred it or burn it?

All those delicate air mail envelopes

blue as Italian sky, their crinkly onion skin

desiccated and ethereal, last stop

between matter and spirit.

Failed reachings-out of business and delight—

trapeze artists inches short

of an outstretched hand.

And Love, of course: its labors

lost for good. Struck since with sober

second thoughts, the cowardice

of common sense. Vesuvius slowly

losing steam. The heart a volcanic rock.

The Dead Letter Office 

takes things philosophically.

They shrug. The situation is not dire. 

In their postal manual, Heraclitus says 

that all creation bears the same return address.

Now or in a thousand years, who cares?

Send it back to the Fire.  

-from Southern Poetry Review, Vol. 47, No. 1