Friday, May 25, 2018


Second Hand
May 20 2018


Things accumulate.

Like the way, in the vastness of space, small chunks of rock
gravitate into clumps
then accrete into bigger ones,
until, in the fullness of time
a planet is born.

And then, how things become fixed;
accustomed
to this thing in its place
as if it had always been thus,
an immovable object
decreed by nature.

The familiar landscape of home.
Which the brain, tuned to the odd and novel and new
soon fails to notice.
And so, like dust-bunnies under the bed
that are out of sight and mind,
or leftovers lost in fridge
behind expired jars of who-knows-what
welded shut by time,
things settle-in
for the long haul.

The bric-a-brac
and tchotchkes
and vintage magazines.

The yellowing ledgers
in the top desk drawer
she could only have kept
for posterity;
the cheque-books balanced, and statements justified,
the manuals and warranties
alphabetically filed,
the carbon-copy receipts.
Testament to a measured life
of zero-sums.

The closet piled high
with old lady clothes
she wore just once,
prudently saved
for the next big event
she was certain would come.

The upstairs rooms, still papered with posters
of a rock-and-roll heroes
and teen-aged angst,
with their little bunk beds
and pink princess sheets,
preserved
like museums to childhood.

So when she finally moved into the senior's home,
the artifacts of a lifetime
were left at the curb
sent to Goodwill
peddled on-line.
And off to the dump with the rest,
without sentiment
or reverence
or pause.

You'd think that time would be fixed,
the seconds counting-off,
the hands of the clock
steadily circling;
a standard unit
like teaspoons, or pounds.
Yet looking ahead 10 years
it seems immeasurably long,
while looking back
it feels like yesterday,
as if the decades all happened at once,
and you were still, somehow
unaccountably young.

Just as the things we hold dear
mean less and less
the older we get,
and what for all those years
you so dutifully kept
becomes disposable.

Old age
is getting used to loss, she said
hobbling about on aching joints
with her bad heart, and rheumy eyes,
but all the stuff
is just dead weight, and nothing more.
So she took some pictures, some letters, a favourite chair
while we spent a week
clearing out the place.
An empty house
that looks immense
with all its clutter gone,
and might as well have belonged
to someone else.

Time moves on
and time is mutable.
We cannot hold back the tide,
or command – arms outstretched – its receding waters to stop.
And in the end
the things we surround ourselves with
cannot protect us from loss
or make life more meaningful.
The seconds
adding relentlessly up,
our allotted time
quickening down.




In its conception, this poem actually began with the observation about the shifting perspective on time. I was thinking of someone in their 20s looking ahead to their 60s: how inconceivable that age must seem; the seemingly infinite amount of time you have. In contrast with looking back: how it all seems like yesterday, and how you are much the same person, despite the passage of time. Which is both good and bad: that you haven't grown as much as perhaps you should have, but also that the essential qualities that make you who you are persist.

Anyway, it is in this looking back that our values also change. When we're past the life stage of accumulating possessions; when we've learned that the hedonic jolt of something new is transient and changes nothing, and that most of these material things – that we once sought after and valued – have little meaning as we get closer to the end of life. Think how liberating it would be if we could leapfrog to that insight years earlier, if we could so easily free ourselves of attachment and desire!

Both of these lines of thought combined with a friend's recent experience: moving her mother from her house of 34 years into a senior's home, and the vast amount of work involved in clearing out all of the accumulated possessions. We work all our lives to obtain this stuff. We maintain it, insure it, worry about it, and get upset if something is damaged or lost. And yet, in the fullness of time, it's all reduced to junk: it's simply a burden; we don't care for it anymore; and certainly no one else does.

Still, the familiar landscape of home is comforting. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Just so.

I quite like the title's double entendre. It works well in a poem that talks about both our relationship to our possessions and our subjective perception of time: second hand goods; the second hand, steadily circling.

This line – while the brain, tuned to the odd and novel and new – was originally “while the brain, tuned to the unexpected”. I felt the final version scanned better. Although "novel" and "new" are, of course, perfect synonyms, and might strike a discerning reader as mere padding and unnecessary wordiness. This is the opposite of what you want in a poem. Because while a poem should contain ambiguity and allusion, it should also have razor-like sharpness in its economy and precision. I think one of the great pleasure I get in reading a poem is when I encounter that one perfectly distilled word that does so much work, that fits in terms of rhyme and rhythm, and yet does so with exquisite brevity and wit. Sometimes, though, a writer gets to indulge:  use some filler for the sake of the sound. It can also be argued that repetition has its place. It provides emphasis and strength. And anyway, two words never mean exactly the same, so a synonym also comes with its own subtle valence, which undoubtedly adds to the richness of the language. 

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