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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.
Copyright ©
Eric Ashford
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