Autumn Perspective - Vanessa Daou

Now, moving in, cartons on the floor

The radio playing to bare walls

Picture hooks left stranded

In the unsoiled squares where paintings were

And something reminding us

This is like all other moving days;

Finding the dirty ends of someone else’s life

Hair fallen in the sink, a peach pit

And burned-out matches in the corner;

Things not preserved, yet never swept away

Like fragments of disturbing dreams

We stumble on all day.

In ordering our lives, we will discard them

Scrub clean the floorboards of this our home

Lest refuse from the lives we did not lead

Become, in some strange, frightening way, our own

And we have plans that will not tolerate

Our fears-- a year laid out like rooms

In a new house--the dusty wine glasses

Rinsed off, the vases filled, and bookshelves

Sagging with heavy winter books

Seeing the room always as it will be

We are content to dust and wait

We will return here from the dark and silent

Streets, arms full of books and food

Anxious as we always are in winter

And looking for the Good Life we have made

I see myself then: tense, solemn

In high-heeled shoes that pinch

Not basking in the light of goals fulfilled

But looking back to now and seeing

A lazy, sunburned, sandaled girl

In a bare room, full of promise

And feeling envious

Now we plan, postponing, pushing our lives forward

Into the future--as if, when the room

Contains us and all our treasured junk

We will have filled whatever gap it is

That makes us wander, discontented

From ourselves

The room will not change:

A rug, or armchair, or new coat of paint

Won’t make much difference;

Our eyes are fickle

But we remain the same beneath our suntans

Pale, frightened

Dreaming ourselves backward and forward in time

Dreaming our dreaming selves

I look forward and see myself looking back