Smith Doorstop - Allison McVety sample poems.pdf - Inpress Books

Telegram
When it came, she put the envelope,
moth wings still folded, still sealed,
into a box too small to hold a dead
not-dead man. The lid, worked
from the burl of an oak, is mortise
and tenoned, closed on a blind
hinge. For eighty years he’s been missing,
presumed dead and killed in action.
A telegram not read places him
in a war grave, on last parade
and in a field hospital on the fringe
of a battleground healed with grass,
his own scabs a knotty veneer,
his memory lost. This box, a trousseau gift
to tot up the cotton, linen, copper years,
not meant to end with paper,
is never opened, its dowels as raw
as when the bradawl, auger, granny’s tooth
had scrawled their marks, its lining spared
the fading light. Imagine a man inside
an envelope, inside a crowded box,
tired of being; imagine lives lived inside out,
of always being a hair’s breadth,
a paper-knife, a bayonet slit from fact.