Poem: The Mystery of an Unopened Box

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I have moved a lot of times. After growing up in one Michigan town (we moved away for one year to a town north of that town when I was in fifth grade), I moved to Chicago for college. From Chicago to Oregon. Back to Michigan, then to California where the kids were born, and from there to Istanbul for three years. Then back to Michigan where we've been these 23 years. (We've also moved many times within Michigan since then, to four different houses in four different towns.)

This summer our children are both making big moves to different parts of the country from where they have been. For some reason this morning I saw their moves to new locales the way I see these boxes in my collection of boxes.

The poem may be oblique, I can't tell sometimes what will speak to you, and what will be silent. Why can't you just read my mind? and vice versa? (I do so thank you for reading.) There may be too many metaphors, and it could no doubt use more work. But I am posting it all the same, for something in its wandering fits the occasion of these moves for me, as I look back on my own moves and changes, realizing that I was always still me, myself, the becoming I, even when what arranged itself around me was in flux. Well, when aren't things in flux? And for that matter, when is a poem ever finished?

The Mystery of an Unopened Box

When you move
to a new location
you stare at it
as at an unopened box.

All your changes
up till now lie across
your body, the zebra
stripes of your life, each with
its corners and turns, feathery
edges, some

elongated tapers
with the elegance of fingers
across familiar string
and fret, others
squat and fat,
nubbed keloid regrets,
missing buttons
from your shirt.

Like your preaching
grandfather’s
eyebrows on your face, or
the flaring keyholes
of your mother’s nostrils,
it is still your

face, just as it is
your box after all
that you will open
even though there are
traces of us others
and your own past
contained in it. They are your

nostrils open to their key—
the fragrance of each
fear, every engineering
angel’s highwayed labyrinth
that rises and
drops again over the velvet
hills, where

hope
like a Joshua tree
waits, arms lifted
for rain
that will most definitely fall
as the sky opens
onto the dusty floor
of a desert valley.

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