The Collectors

THE COLLECTORS

     after Magritte

I know it was our father’s house,

but prudence says he wouldn’t mind

your packing up his legacies, a trunk

or two of city clothes, a photograph,

perhaps, of what had been a neighborhood

where now the sea laps barren beach

behind your yard. Do you enjoy the thought

that apple trees you climbed as a boy

are now the hanging place of cuttlefish?

Do you expect that whatever it is

that gobbles houses by night

and hauls the sidewalk off in chunks

will spare your little edifice?

I don’t worry so much                    

about the lobsters, big as cows,

that made off with the Belgian clock,

the marble mantelpiece, or the horn

that I left in the attic; their taste

is too baroque to warrant another visit.

But I will prove, if I must

with photographs and measurements

that the oblong rock once half a mile

at sea will soon adorn the lawn,

then, with a nudge, the stairs;

next day it will bulge into the parlor;

and probably within a fortnight

sweep you a mile up the beach

to that stack of abandoned houses

where it has already assembled

what’s left of the town.

It’s one thing to be “lived through”

by Cosmic Consciousness,

serving some higher purpose as though

the Universe had plans, and we

were its chessmen. But this won’t do,
this passive acceptance of

granite elbow-nudge,

this nibbling away at things,

reducing us to dust mite status

at the bottom of the vacuum bag!

Note: This is a revision of a poem that appeared in Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems. I suppose the "victim" feeling of the narrator is a good metaphor for today's politics, where we are all being nibbled to death by mice. The poem refers to three Magritte paintings, two of which I found, and was written back in the days when Barbara A. Holland and I hurled Magritte-inspired poems at one another weekly at poetry readings. These poems don't make a whole lot of sense alone, but when read against the paintings, I think they're pretty amusing: the weakness of "ekphrastic" poetry is that poet and reader really need to share the image. Magritte's strange work continues to haunt me, odd since I am not in the least a modernist.