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Moving Day
Mary Mercier

If I turned it upside down—
shook it as I do the dried heads of the poppies—
would this house release its hold of each possession—
would everything like seeds disperse, and could it
be that easy?

Still here the empty house.

Of which letting go is far more difficult
than of what had been inside.
Without its furniture, without so much
as a remainder, this house becomes magnetic,
more wanted than before.

More compelling than commerce the negative space
that painters adore, the unreserved emptiness
of air. One stops if only to imagine

windows flung wide in the kitchen,
sunlight falling into silence on the floor.
An attic open to a sky
still blue with beginning—invitation to
unfettered days, to possibility instead of fact.
Who wouldn’t trade ambition
for something like that?

—
Mary Mercier is a poet inspired by the bite of old glaciers. Her chapbook Small Acts was published by Parallel Press and her poems have appeared in Northern Woodlands, Mezzo Cammin, Stoneboat, and other journals. A finalist for the Birdy Poetry Prize, her collection Five Reports of Fugitive Dust has just been published by Meadowlark Press.

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Have you read these poems:
Traveling in Absolutes by Jason Centrone
Summer’s End by William Swarts

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