Mail Pouch

Mail Pouch

After the painted words wash away
from the side of a barn,
the wood still says Chew MAIL POUCH
Tobacco where the letters
had held on for fifty years, talking
to the road, to cars driving
and not stopping. The barn remembers
the message that had shielded
it, as a wall recalls in ghostly outline
the framed pictures
that lived there so long. The wall and wood
used to look like the patches
beneath the paintings and paint, the places
where the material stayed
young for the longest. We open memories
like umbrellas, keeping them
until we can’t, when the shielded parts
of us step out and speak.