Minnie Bruce Pratt
Mailing a Letter : The Miserable Highways*
Through the double-thick pane of plastic glass, we talk.
Time for two, three sentences, no more, as the line lengthens.
To others, Marguerita says, Que’ pasa? When I ask, Lisa just
smiles. Atul says, My feet, my back. Sometimes as he sorts
the morning delivery through the lozenge of my open mailbox,
I see his mouth. He says, It's OK, I can talk. My hand is working.
As they talk, their hands punch, check, stamp, write names
in triplicate. They take and give money. They bundle our letters.
The walls are piled with boxes of our words, folded, sealed,
ready to travel far beyond us. The relation between us becomes
the relation between things, and words turn into numbers.
My letter, like every place on earth, has its denomination,
and Mr. Atulkumar punches it in. He has the book of codes,
but perhaps he still worries. In Guajarat the earthquake folds up
houses until no one is left to write home to. Perhaps he worries
like my neighbor, Mr. Goldstein, who carried dead letters home
from work. At night he searched his atlas for the scrawled lost
cities, places someone was trying to get back to, places someone
had never been. When they carried him out, I was in the foyer,
getting my mail out of the metal grille of boxes. He was a lump
under a sheet on a stretcher,. For days he was a sweet stench
at the door of his apartment, his one room, the walls stacked
chin-high with neatly tied bundles of letters, and on his desk
a little pile of letters. Some he had opened; the others, not.
*The title is from Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto.