Boxes
I spent the Labor Day weekend sorting through cardboard coffins—a.k.a., Bankers Boxes—crammed with my “papers.” Once upon a time, these sheets were bright with blankness. Then I saw fit to deface them with my literary scribblings and lay them away like a gangster’s treasure. What was I thinking? Reading them now comes at a steep cost, both physical and emotional. The paper nearly crumbles at the touch of an eye-beam. Formerly wingéd words have become dust. Poems induce coughing fits.
Speaking of poems, in one box I came across a bundle by my old friend Alice. We met in college and shared an Irish passion for all things literary. After graduating in the spring of 1980, we remained chums through the decades, exchanging letters and poems and visits, though sadly these began falling off by the second decade of the new century. Then Alice passed away in 2017. One poem she wrote—all those years ago—stayed with me. Regrettably, I had no copy of it, just a lingering albeit imprecise recollection. It was a great delight then to come upon a typescript of that poem stashed among others in the bundle. Here it is:
This Wooden Box
The feel of the wood is good to the touch
So rich with grain and dark color.
The feel of the wood is smooth to the touch
Polished to a high gloss shine.
The feel of the wood is solid to the touch
So strong though curved and bent.
The feel of the wood is cool to the touch.
My father lies within.
In another one of my storage boxes, I found a 1987 letter from Alice. By that point, I was living in California, attending graduate school, and she was still in Maine. We had continued to exchange verses, and she was always frank in her criticism. She closed her letter with these words: “Your poems are so cryptic now. Send old poems.” I don’t remember how I responded, probably with something cryptic. Yet as I consider her words today, I reckon she was right.
So, Alice, here’s an old poem, which had been decomposing in the same cardboard box along with your poems, still keeping good company despite it all. Slán go fóill, mo chara.
April
Set the fields afire,
sent its smoky smell of spring into the air,
blackened the hill, charred the soil,
saw the chance to surround us again in green walls,
forced the season,
shouted serotinous schemes of design
across senseless landscapes,
called your sister so she could see
seeds of fire and sultry flowers,
borne sweet and lost,
on currents of flame that desiccated the sky.
©John P. O’Grady
