Cleaning Out Old Letters

Little by little
the past flutters
into a cardboard box, overflowing
leaves, like a nibbled white flower
dangling staples and 3-ring holes.

Rising aromatic
under the clutter
winters, springs, highway signs
spiral from dusty roads in the mind
wafting on Dears and Sincerelys
far countrysides, long fallow.

Throw one letter away
- a chain is broken.
Darkness thickens over forgetting.
No daisies blink as the sun
slips from gold to rose.

Tomorrow is
a quilt with patches missing
tossed on a clothesline across the sky.
See how the fields flap through?
Yesterdays blur into bushes and lawn
- no handing back for mends
in digital time.

Knowing, I still throw away.
The box will bounce through the city's
streets on top of a truck,
dreams, aches, words,
soon to be heaved on the dump,
more and more fragrant
with Nothingness,

as I too will drop
into a box, a hole
- housecleaned for the hereafter.

Susan Ioannou
Toronto, Ontario