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Plunder

On a day of windy transition, one season to the next, 

you spoke of helping your mother close her house, 

of the choices you had to make—what to discard, 

what to keep—as if it were your childhood itself 

waiting to be plundered. You kept a Persian rug, 

all reds and golds, to walk on every day, 

keeping the past alive under your feet; 

those nested Russian dolls you played with 

as a girl: grandmother, mother, daughter; 

four bentwood chairs wrenched now from their table.

I listened, thinking I'd be next to try 

to crowd a lifetime of things 

into a shrinking universe of boxes. 

I've started to dismantle my life already, throwing 

out letters from people I remember loving, 

choosing among books—this one to stay, 

that one to go—as if I were a judge 

sentencing some to death, the rest 

to the purgatory of the emptying shelf.

Perhaps I should simply burn it all.

But don't we live on in what we've left behind? 

In the fading twilight of Kodak? In our silver 

knives and spoons tarnishing on a grandchild's 

casual table? Don't these become 

a kind of museum of the afterlife? 

The pharaohs had it right. They took 

their whole world with them—vases and chests, 

gilded statues, jewels—plundered perhaps, 

but not for a thousand years. 

Nefertiti's tomb has never been found.

Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan's latest book is Insomnia. She received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2003 and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award.