Moving House
By Benno Barnard
The boxes for chips and bananas
are packed with the bric-à-brac
of human memory:
plugs, artifacts, burial objects –
relics,
gradually grown cultic
from perishing in the attic,
and now being relocated.
Carved bones, painted shards
to protect our fleeting souls
from almighties and telluric forces.
We are hunters and gatherers.
We are fleeing Trojans,
nine cellars behind us.
Is that a thought?
But every thought is a frantic game
of dice on the cart now jolting
out of Asia Minor,
followed by the neighbor’s Rottweiler
and some Hector’s bouncing body.
One plate goes to the gods.
Inside a box – unseen, unheard –
the wooden alphabet
spells a word.
Where there’s a will, there’s the West.
It’s not until we arrange our bed
between new walls, locate power points,
and check that we can never gauge
the space in every box of books, that we
relax as people of the modern age.
