Drawers and Space

By A.E. Bayne

The drawers that you keep
within cabinets, dressers, bureaus, and buffets;
amid card tables, nightstands, and silver chests,
are corpses stained, polished with names of what they once were:
cherry, oak, pine, walnut, maple.

Yours is a wood-scented home,
a copse furnished with behemoths
filling noses and rooms with equal oppressiveness.
Their drawers encase the minutia of sentiment, personalities, and permanence.
Beliefs are buried in the sheer pages of family bibles,
under long-grayed photographs,
tossed with paper clips and rubber bands,
and folded between t-shirts and undergarments.
Thoughts, plans, desires, banalities are captured in tight, dark repositories,
their smooth surfaces glazed with circumstances untold.

Closed, crushed, stuffed, precisely set into drawers.

Grab handle or knob, yank wide the cavernous hollows.
Fling them open and explore.
Shake out your secrets, those things that are frozen in space.
Truth extrapolated.