Clutter

Sometimes, I dream of a fire.

From the depths of my chair,

I watch the spark catch on the good, dry kindling

Of picture books we read and read and will never read again.

I watch hungry tongues lick at pages oiled by sticky fingers,

And fed, stretch with ease to higher shelves with thicker spines,

Devouring my youth - obsolete, it seems -

The same as theirs, which surely still deserves a space

Alongside romance, adventure, horror.

But the flames take them all, and I can breathe more easily, they say,

With fewer weights about my person.

The flames take them all, and the ornamentation too.

A bundle of rosemary cut from the garden

And allowed to atrophy while gently perfuming the room

Cannot be worth saving.

The photograph of all of us smiling in the sun,

Seems to melt from within,

While the hourglass, heated, shatters,

Pouring unfettered sand onto the fire.

The blue bird that was never lapis lazuli

spreads wings of amber and granted flight, expires,

And I do not notice her lone ascension,

Only the sun on my face, the smile I faked,

Because joy is rarely a single snapshot,

But I wanted me to know, ten years from that day,

That we had been happy.

I reset my fire then, to skirt around the pictures, at least,

And take only the books not yet read.

I will the spark to skip the Mother's day card,

The Valentine, the crayon portrait we each believe could be us

By virtue of the hearts for eyes,

And leave the lapis bird to her nest.