Keeping Things No One Else Wants
In the closet hidden behind a bookshelf, crumbling
picture albums await further decrepitude, full
of people most of us have never known,
and the oldest, still living, no longer recognize.
Things mark time. Like Dad’s chilled
white work shirts (sprinkled on wash day)
waited in the fridge for ironing day. His six-foot
wooden ladder still stands guard by my garage door.
Grandma’s aluminum kitchen funnel, dulled,
dented, no handle, and her crocheted doilies
– Mom filled a dresser drawer after her passing.
Gifts to Mom found unused on a closet top shelf:
garden boots, rice steamer, linen placemats.
After older siblings had stormed through, I recovered
the leftovers and hugged myself, as if crouching
beneath the last safe spot (under the bathroom sink)
while tornado sirens wail and lightning cracks
– a mass of crows erupting from the trees.
Chipped flowered bowls only used as a teenager
on popcorn nights. My oldest brother’s middle school
sailor cap, his nickname Goody scrawled in faded marker.
I close my eyes and these things shimmer round me
like bees from hive boxes centered in a flowering field.
From Mom’s mantle I even grabbed a Viking Cruises
brochure – junk mail Mom kept a year before her death
and after decades without travel. While I stand now
among evaporating ocean foam on a still damp beach,
clumps of bubbles cross wet sand, driftwood,
half buried, awaits the call to a pyre.
About the Author: David A. Goodrum is the author of Abrupt Edges (Bass Clef Books, 2025), Vitals and Other Signs of Life (The Poetry Box, 2024) and Sparse Poetica (Audience Askew, 2023). Recent journal publications have appeared in The Orchards Poetry Journal (which awarded his poem “Winter Inquisition” a Pushcart Nomination), Cirque, and Triggerfish Critical Review, among others. David lives in Corvallis, Oregon, and is the current president of the Oregon Poetry Association. See more at http://www.davidgoodrum.com.
Image Credit: Edwaert Collier “Vanitas Still Life” (1662) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
As It Ought To Be 