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Repose


This house is a museum of others,
Other possessions, the walls wear
The signs of life.  They breathe--
A gallery of essential things,
Dried flowers in frames, miniature spoons,
Shadow boxes of anniversaries, thimbles,
A tile-chip, Registry Room, Ellis Island,
Souvenirs of sentimental journeys,
The gold-plated ashtray from the World’s Fair
Each one the perfect thing that could not be
Remembered, the souls of human experience,
Glassed linen doilies snatched from the chairs
Of the dead, where they once rested
Surrounded by other lives, dreamed
Of the departed as though to make them
Their own, the things they were we are
Or try to be and we look on these
As we would look on the hearts of heaven.

Curator of the repository, I have gone
To estate sales, second-hand stores at night
To rescue the damned, just one more
Ghost Ranch with translucent sheep
And dissolving sky to mix with my wife’s
Watercolors of abandoned farms, a reprieve
Before they pass again into the hands
Of strangers, themselves borrowers,
Then sold, misplaced, discarded, lost,
An oak box clock smelling of lemon oil
That resonates on the hour with arguments
And the exclamations of its owners,
A mandolin, my father’s teak table,
Closets full of suits, cleaned, in plastic bags
Hung like the bodies of past relatives
To these we add a few things of our own,
My wife’s art, my room of poems, this house itself
An abode of souls inhabited now by others.

                             
-from Earthly Bodies, (Pudding House Pr., 2004)

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©2016 Michael Gessner