Hunter S. Wycoff

I was not Hunter S. Wycoff,
he did not live on this street,
but the one with
swimming pools and fences.
But his letters came
to my mailbox,
stamped from Russia,
with notes
in foreign tongue on
the back.


Great manilla operations,
taped and sealed
for a man four doors down,
whose body never left 
the front porch swing,
when I was six
I thought he had died there.


And I wasn't a woman 
with expensive jewelry tastes,
tacky collections of gems
on their wrists, martinis
by those damn pools
a street or two over.
Hunter S. Wycoff
was probably her pool boy.


The envelopes 
flowed through the
brass door, flopped
like cold fish into the
foyer. Glistening things,
great treasures I was
forbidden from
opening, 
something like
the Ark of Indiana Jones.


The puttering walk
of the think-lensed mailman
was an agony, the letters poured
through, a stack an inch high
for a man I never met,
between him and his 
possible mail-order bride.
I intercepted so many,
they spoke in vague tongues,
wedged between the jeweler's ads
for the whitest of diamonds,
they were racists uptown.


And the man who put them there,
unawares as he was,
was my executioner for months,
until a new man came,
carrying off the exotic mail.


He told me the old mailman
was dyslexic. 
I had been Hunter S. Wycoff
for months without 
my own consent.