You must not remain here, where you’ve piled
strata of memory higher and higher still.
Where dust chloroforms the breathable air
and stands in its place. Where boxes
form labyrinths smoothed down by your shoulders
over a thousand passages. We will lead you…
gently, obliquely…from this place.
Where we find snowdrifts of old linens,
a wind farm’s worth of box fans,
decks of playing cards where time’s slow magic
caused an ace or two to disappear.
You’ve kept tongue-tied ink pens long after
they’ve run out of small talk. Here are
postcards of old buildings when “are” was still
the link that bound them to lives.
A box of bent books showed you studied
shipwrecks, over and over, when your
own buoyancy was a thing you did not think upon.
It grows later. The clock in the kitchen hobbles,
but keeps the time true enough. We will
remove from this place those things that you need,
with you the harvest’s best part of all.
Timothy Martin’s work has appeared in numerous journals. He has also published three collections of verse, Stealing Hymnals from the Choir from FutureCycle Press (recipient of the publisher’s annual Book Prize), Drowning at the Pool Party for Lifeguards from Prolific Press, and Tesserae from Orchard Street Press.
