Shelved

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I began this poem by cataloging things that are set away for another time. While writing I became nostalgic and thought of my Uncle Jimmie, and the grief of his life when he lost his wife, my Aunt Ginny, first to mental illness shortly after their daughter, my only cousin, was born, then sometime not too long after, to death. Later he lost their daughter, too, much too young. Then the poem slipped into fiction, as he never lived on a farm that I know of, and he did find love again with a second wife, though he outlived her, too. So this is about a farmer who was not as fortunate as my uncle perhaps, but who I'm sure must have lived like this. I don’t write many rhyming poems, but rhymes seem suited for nostalgia.

Shelved

Bone plates in the cupboard
for blackberries and pears;
onions in a basket flaking
down the basement stair;

photos crammed in shoeboxes
behind the cabinet’s frieze;
winter boots under winter coats,
and under the lid: piano keys;

clippers in a copper bowl,
mauve eggs in the house of wrens;
golf clubs in the attic next to
the glass ballerina “Madeleine”;

amber rectangle of Chanel
shining at the bottom of a vial,
sleeping eyes and teeth and tongue
in the silent accumulation of bile;

poems in books, bats in the barn,
attar in furrows of unopened roses,
the moon and stars in the light of day,
the sun, after night’s closet closes;

needles and yarn in an old crewel bag,
half-finished sweater, an undarned sock,
piles of cotton, batting and lace,
a refashioned dress just ready to smock;

shovels and rakes hung head up
between the nails of the shed,
firewood honeycombed along a wall,
the axe asleep in its bed

like old Uncle Jim, love-lost and meek
when at last we laid him in earth;
wind in the crotch of the giant oak,
hens lined up on their berth;

his heart in its shell as snug as an egg
dropped warm from its mother hen,
eclipsed by a shroud when Aunt Ginny died
and it never came out again.



May 2012

Poetry should be heard.

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