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.