Steamer Trunk

Steamer Trunk

We had a steamer trunk that was a refrigerator
for old magazines and toys of our ancestors.

Someday I was to inherit the train and tin soldiery,
my sister the dolls. They stood in the trunk my mother cracked

to let us see our future in her past. The dolls and things
inhabited the steamer trunk like apartment dwellers

after an earthquake, but you opened the steamer trunk
like a reluctant fridge or a door that was one-third its house.

Only our mother had the key; she’d traveled once by ship
though it seemed the steamer trunk was a mode of travel

by itself: houseboat, space portal, even submarine –
conceived before they knew what one should look like.

When I wasn’t looking it was gone, the steamer trunk;
the toys and other things escaped as well. What test

did we fail to lose our inheritance? I forget whole years,
and even people and places, so of course

I might have had the toys and lost them.
But the trunk’s compartments are still here:

the must, the brown shadows, the rust of metal joints
and faded flowers of the lining: open the door,

smell the salt-sea air, wave to passing voyagers.
O fluttering, birds of eyelashes! Sleep; arrive.

*

Another of several nostalgia odes (as opposed to elegies). Things that counter the increasing virtuality of our lives.

Continuing as well, my effort to discover the fugue within each poem: three or four sounds that repeat, lull, anchor the poem --

There was a steamer trunk, somewhere: but perhaps not belonging to my mother. I remember the temptation to enter it; I remember its walls and rooms, and the attic light. But beyond that, this is made up. Or it is everyone's middle-class, early-twentieth-century childhood.