In the attic or cellar, back in some drawer, way back
on the top shelf of somebody’s closet
were the stamp albums and the baseball cards,
both cap pistols in their leather holsters.
In our house there was room enough-
nothing was actually lost,
even if we didn’t know where to look.
So those guns rusted, and the pages of books
turned brown or gathered mold. No one
had taken proper care, but of course
that wasn’t the point. Permanence
was never the point. Instead:
a desire not to feel regret.
When the time came,
both parents gone, and the house
up for sale, every closet open to inspection,
I took what I thought I wanted
even if not to decide
was what I wanted, to leave things
in their places, let the pictures crack and the mice
chew at the spines of the Hardy Boys and
Tom Swift and His Submarine,
Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship,
Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire.
Not selling them or throwing them away,
not saving them either. The way we think
anything can be remembered, if memory
is like opening the right drawer
or taking a box down from a high shelf
for no particular reason.
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