Dead Letter Office Boxes

Christopher Tower

Some poems cause heart seizures and death
to those who read the verses.
Too fierce to be murdered, these poems
must be preserved; they must be prevented
from wiping out the minuscule percentage
of the world's population reading poetry.

These 25,000 poems are locked in boxes,
some with, some without keys.
I found a keyless box (they are scattered
all over the world) in the cellar-vault
of Toledo's art museum. Etched on the
metal lid was: "POEM 17,391: DANGEROUS
WHEN OPENED." I absconded with that box.
Some boxes have locks that open
through lock-smithery, cajoling, or insult.

Some poems are boxed with keys to limit
but not prevent the readings of these dangerous,
though not always lethal, poems.

Once an editor in Manhattan slipped
me a skeleton key as we kissed,
like Houdini's wife to Houdini:
our tongues moving, like tiny hands.
But she didn't know the location of the box --
#12,995 -- just the key.
I found it two years later in a cabinet,
under the washbasin, in a Sunoco station
south of Idaho Falls.

At first, I was too afraid
to open it. After driving through rain
for three hours, I stopped, propped the box
on the hood of my red Monte Carlo -- rain
punched the car like sticks on a drum in triple
time -- and opened the box.

Folded up inside the box, the manhattan editor
looked like an elegant, table napkin,
or a love note from a high school sweetheart,
-- head tucked under legs and body wrapped around.
Her face was folded nine times -- eyes on eyes,
her nose in an ear -- but her tongue was missing,
​as if she had grown up without one.