Leavings

When I am only an almanac of belonging left behind I will leave a son who will move on allowing me time to pick his pockets of the sins of his father. There will be grandchildren tucked away in kindergartens, my stick figure and bloated face peering adoringly at them from nursery walls. The fridge door is a temple to all I love and their absurd rate of growth, also the shifting dunes of windblown years. To leave a wife who loves me, will be the hardest and easiest. She who has agreed to forget me just as soon as she can will stick to her word, for she has forgotten already what a great lover I used to be. All else is already showing the telltale signs of old love affairs, their sweet regrets loom large now cumbersomely so. Some rooms are for such things peculiar to me alone. My interests, my collections, once desirable objects now bearing a false and incomprehensible witness to holes in my life I tried to fill. There’s more baggage in the attic and garage, where a kind of surgery known only to collectors of hollow meanings has taken place. Music I will take with me for it has saturated my being and cannot now be located in flesh and bone. Then there is the poetry and my first wife both have been filed away untidily on an internet cloud, where she still critiques my words with a jaundiced eye. I fear my purchases will go the way of all such impulsive fantasies notable only for their volume and not their content. I wonder if those that will pick through these accumulated impedimenta will they consider for a moment what great need overtook me, what my intentions could have been? Truth is, I cannot recall intending any of this.