THE QUAKER OATS TIN
In the cupboard, the old tin keeps its night,
A Quaker face grinning through rust into light,
It holds no oats now, but a widow's last name,
A wedding ring wrapped in a handkerchief of flame,
A photograph folded where the cowboys once rode,
Three letters from a man who never came home,
And the silence of a life no one dared to explain.
The tin knows the winter, the hunger, the rain,
Knows which children laughed and which mothers knew pain,
A lock of black hair, a ribbon gone brown,
A telegram saying somebody didn't come down,
A child's tooth, saved because nothing else stayed,
A church receipt for a marriage that failed,
And a key to a door that was never opened again.
We kept our small fortunes against the day,
Buried our grief in the ordinary way,
Coins beside buttons, a medal beside thread,
A prescription for fever beside a note from the dead,
And underneath them, a joy nobody could name,
The receipt for a honeymoon, still bearing her name,
While dust gathered softly over everything we became.
Out on the frontier, men rode beneath the sky,
Carrying their secrets where the dry grasses lie,
Women kept letters beneath flour and lace,
And smiled at the neighbours with a perfectly innocent face,
While somebody's lover waited beyond the hill,
Somebody's husband came home carrying still
The terrible knowledge that a life can disappear without a sound.
But the tin survived the horses and the guns,
Outlived the fathers, the daughters, the sons,
It crossed into kitchens with linoleum floors,
Sat quietly beside newer and brighter drawers,
And gathered the evidence of our ordinary days,
Our divorces, our birthdays, our complicated ways,
Until history itself began to smell of metal and dust.
Now we open it carefully, uncertain and slow,
As if the dead might still object to what we know,
There are names we remember, and names we forget,
Promises kept, and promises carrying debt,
A photograph where everyone seems happy and young,
A letter whose final sentence was never quite sung,
And suddenly the whole house is listening.
Perhaps this is all that a life leaves behind,
A rusted little vessel for the secrets of mind,
Joy folded with sorrow, affection with shame,
Lives once concealed from the world without name,
The frontier is gone, but the hiding remains,
We still lock our histories inside ordinary things,
And call it a tin, when it is really a graveyard of echoes.
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