Astonished

Gone are the seventy one boxes
of books that filled up half of
the storage Pod, her historical
biographies, my old textbooks on
Pseudodifferential operators and microphysics,
all the Pogo books

Gone are the arcane kitchen utensils,
the high-carbon cleaver I’ve
had since ’78, the
apple corers and lime squeezers I’d
used to make Cosmos on Thursdays
sipped on the balcony watching the container
ships come in from Shanhai

Gone are the strings of Christmas lights in the shapes
of pigs, and all the other pig items
people gave Gigi because they thought
she liked pigs because of all the pigs
she had

Gone are the mattresses, tables, flashlights,
food processors, crescent wrenches,
clothes, framed pictures of grandmothers,
turkey smokers, halogen reading
lamps, geometric models of archimedean
solids that used to hang from
the ceiling of my office

Gone and Gone are all the
things that kept the wood-floored
rooms of this apartment from
the echoes of footsteps

Now there is only me, and Gigi,
a couple of rosemary plants
whose branches have seen so
many roasted chickens, a philodendron,
and a bonsai juniper tree that
mom just sent, with instructions that
it needed daily watering

Now in this house
there is only air, a solid
floor on which to walk, and
we the living, we the mortal
transient things to whom existence
is a fragile thing, and not a
permanent state of being.

And Now, Only Now, is it so
clear: These things, these
foolish solid things, are of no weight.
We the living, and those that
we love in this one, wild life,
are all that have ever mattered,
and all that ever will.

–Niles Ritter (With eternal thanks to Cathy & her Writing Class)
July 2, 2008