The wax jack — a device for holding a coil of wax taper that unrolls as it burns, used for melting sealing wax — appears in poems about the culture of correspondence and the ritual of the sealed letter; A poem about an eighteenth-century desk might describe the wax jack: "the coiled taper feeding slowly upward through the holder, the flame waiting at its tip — the seal not yet applied, the letter not yet sent, the decision still reversible"; In a poem about the writing of a difficult letter, the wax jack is the last stage before commitment: "she held the stick of sealing wax to the taper's flame, watching the red drip — the letter sealed was the letter sent, the wax jack the instrument of the irrevocable"; The wax jack's elegant mechanism — the coil of wax taper feeding through a holder at a constant rate — gives it a place in poems about time and the management of a necessary light; A poem about a Georgian gentleman's writing room might inventory the desk: "the standish, the sand caster, the wax jack, the seal — each object the instrument of a communication that required more preparation than our own, and perhaps for that reason carried more weight"; In a poem about the loss of correspondence culture, the wax jack stands as an emblem of what sealed letters required: "flame, wax, a seal, a decision — the letter that required all this was harder to send, and therefore meant more when it arrived"; A contemporary poem about finding a wax jack in an antique shop might describe holding it: "the coil socket empty, the flame long since out — but the device still ready, still waiting for the taper and the letter that needed closing."