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By Greg Miller
A little rain spits in the open tent,
the auctioneer ringing bits of meaning
against his more meaningless bits of singing.
Heavy Victorian pieces – inlaid secretaries
with accordion lids that wink shut through grooves,
marble-topped servers, lyre-tables
with full wings let down for room –
float on long sheets of plywood that move as you walk
over the sucking mud-mess at their base.
Most of the family shops in town
don’t open at all anymore.
Old pistols, silver, china, beds, clocks, desks;
some fluted rose chimneys for Viennese gaslights;
clocks in the Empire Style, with gilded Titans
reclining to turn towards time’s face;
rice beds that rise so far
from the ground that small children
might sleep in them only
at their peril; thimbles,
pewter pitchers, velour
mahogany boxes for silver settings.
The house behind the auction is Federal style.
In the 1820’s, when it was built,
the whole town was new, ripped
from the forest
at the edge of the Barrens.
Some Amish families,
having moved a community here
a few decades ago
from Ohio, mingle with the world.
The muddy barefoot boys
in buttoned denim – they’re all
grins and happiness.
In a shed by the tent, I walk into another
auction: “arrowheads”
in a shoe box, collected
on somebody’s farm.
A bonneted woman in her fifties,
her daughter’s hand in hers, both of them
in black and white, hovers,
tired, in the dark,
her free arm resting on another
child on its way. The floating body
of the world takes and lives.
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