A Poem a Day (600): The closet

 
The closet
 
There’s an empty closet that bears your given name,
carved inside the hollow, wooden walls, nestled beyond
the mothballs, the sickly-sweet scent of lavender’s cloy
in nibbled linings through which your coins always slid.
 
We packed your many shaded things into black bin bags,
carted them off to be given to those who might need them,
carrying the memory of the unknown you on their backs.
 
Those unsellable items we still hang in your closet, all lined up
neatly, marking your daily presence in our humdrum lives,
like enduring flags on the startled face of the pocked moon.
 
If you hold them to your face, they still smell of you,
whispering picture-postcard memories cast adrift on air,
of holding our first bikes still, foam-hemmed bucket beaches,
stones skimming silent waters and curling cigar smoke.
 
A walking stick pokes out sometimes when you open the door.
At other times it slumps at angles, mimicks your jovial stance,
and I wonder if you’re moving it somehow just to prank us.
 
I tried to read your favourite newspaper the other morning,
but the words stuck silent on the page, didn’t lift so light as
in the way you could narrate a story, put flesh on the bone,
in your quirky fashion no reporter would ever think to try.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, August 23, 2023