Jonathan Harrington
Underwear of the Dead
Moving again
for the fourth time in
four years. Each box I pack,
each back-breaking crate I
lift onto the hand truck
makes me wonder if this
will be the last box, last
time I must shift my life
from one 900 square feet
of real estate to another
before I myself am boxed up
and shipped off to the next
world leaving someone else behind
to do the heavy lifting.
Times like these remind
us of that final move we have made
for a mother, father, an uncle or a sister—
the ultimate moving day when the tenant
of that now empty house has ducked responsibility
and slipped off to a green patch of quiet earth
to rest while we must sort through
the remnants of a life—
photos whose subjects we cannot identify,
knick-knacks from cities we have never
wished to visit, and the most ghastly
relic of all—the underwear of the dead—
bras, boxers, panties
from which the soul has fled.
Jonathan Harrington, The Frozen Sea Within Us, Beltway Editions, 2023.