The Family Archive
With moldy hand through tender shards I graze
In boxes, old and dusty, some collapsed,
And gently now curate chaotic stuff,
In decades gathered, then in time forgot.
The pictures, clippings, postcards, angry notes,
The scribbles, artwork, essays, bank receipts,
Notebooks, papers, scrapbooks, letters, missives…
Accumulated, tucked away, consigned.
Shifted drawer to drawer and place to place,
House to house and age to age and thus
To me, reluctant keeper, holder now,
By circumstance, of this unsightly mass.
By diligently working I’ll preserve
The meaningful, and cull and organize,
And relegate the great amounts of chaff,
And separate, distinguish all the lives.
I’ll save these chancy documents of life,
By seven children carelessly compiled,
By this reluctant keeper now imbued
With strange officious weightiness at last.
Not easy, though, proceeds the keeper’s hand,
Who saw and heard, or learnt, or knows the tales,
In spirit, part of everything evoked,
Who shared the stage, the joys, the sadness too.
For those to whom discarded things belong
May fairly just discard them on receipt,
The keeper, though, who plucked them, passed them on
Can scarce avoid the buffeting they bring.
Not just the silent quaintness found in things—
Forgotten words or fading photographs—
So much as that they stir a time or place,
Whole periods of life and all their scenes.
These roughly float disturbed through musty air,
To light upon a disconcerted soul,
And stay the keeper briefly from his work,
Perhaps to cause a smile, a shrug, a sigh…
And room is made for yet another age,
From stacks of paper organized and piled
In shining boxes, for my siblings tagged,
From culled-out refuse tossed beside the curb.
Yes—clear some room for yet another age,
An age whose leavings won’t be quite so thick,
An age of many pages without form,
In ether born and kept—they don’t impose:
No physical reminder, and as such
No keeper, then, to linger over them,
Not any one, in dour solitude,
In time to sort through time and think it real.
And so, a proclamation and a tear,
The proud reluctant keeper’s done his work,
His duty, lonely taken up, discharged,
Long to work on his reluctant mind,
Till things evoked and images aroused,
In dusty mental boxes be consigned.
Robert Thomas, a graduate of the classics program at Oxford, writes poetry, short stories and alternative history fiction. He lives in Toronto, Canada. His website is robertthomasauthor.com
Robert, you have penned an evocative work. I am pleased that you chose blank verse.
The practical side of me asks why keep things that are mere clutter, like ancient bank receipts and long-forgotten, unlabeled photographs, moving them from house to house instead of shredding them.
Good question. It speaks to the reflexive or causal accumulation of materials, much of it of marginal archival or sentimental value. Hence the need to “cull and organize” and the “culled-out refuse”.
Your poem, Robert, offers an orderly arrangement, describing the speaker’s work boxed in quatrains. The final stanza with six lines rather than four, seems to represent the “too much stuff” that always overflows places planned for it. One special line: “In time to sort through time and think it real.” The photographs and handwritten notes (if not long) pull up that reality of the past for me. Your easy meter makes the thought flow just as it might for the “reluctant keeper.” Your repetitions (including the word “reluctant”) point to the tedium of the task, and help remarkably to achieve a good finish (especially important when the topic seems boring in itself). The last word “consigned” re-appears from an early quatrain, but at the end of the poem, it’s in a subjunctive construction with “be,” suggesting the ongoing work yet to occupy the speaker’s “mental boxes,” even though his sorting duty is “discharged.”
Thanks for these interesting comments, Margaret. The subjunctive mood of the second “consigned” I suppose does evoke a kind of fatefulness, like I know these things will be forgotten by me in time, and I’m sadly resigned.
Oh! The dust, all the damn dust!