98poems/moving

He sorts through
his untended boxes
from the last few years,
I stare at the growing
emptiness.
He cannot see it, much
as he does not notice home
coalesce around him.
Nor chaos.
The outlines where baskets
hung on the walls,
stained by our daily fires,
the bare shelf where
my mother’s bells sat,
the mirror corner
where my string of wooden
spools hung.
My weeds have gathered
with their pots
in a box near the front door,
my baskets beside them.
First to come,
first to go,
what I like best and
can carry by myself.
My policy used to be
to own nothing two women
couldn’t lift.
But I’ve failed to keep it up,
in the form of a sleeper
sofa and a tile table
too heavy to talk about.
And there are too many books,
no matter how much
I weed them out.

6/2/98