December 4, 2012

living museum

It is not light work, sorting through boxfuls of letters penned
in the first dewy throes of love, years after the bubble burst.
Nor the entries of a fresh journal begun with gusto then abandoned
after the threshold for discomfort and inertia wasn't passed
and the pages became, instead, a series of lists or a matrix
of equations for when the credit card bill would finally get paid.
She wonders what's kept her lugging the collection, what sticks
from move to move and house to house, even when it's stayed
in boxes all the while, yellowing with time, and only knows that the weight
of it matters. Like an open window or an empty plate.