We’ll Be Going Soon | Alexandra Berryman

We’ll be going soon,

so take care to find your coat on the rack

and lose the silver tray you brought in––

please don’t think to close the door,

for the worms will find their way in anyhow.

Anyhow, the place will be different soon,

the paintings fallen off the walls,

A taxidermied buck

whose lonely head has found the secret to eternal life

will be keeping watch over all the dust.

Dust, soon, will become irrelevant, invented for a world that sits still––

soon nothing will sit still, and indoors will cease to exist:

we left the door open, remember that?

And the worms did find their way in.

In matters of life, death will be no villain,

death will only move things along––

butterfly wings, scraps of bark, the whole assembly

will see death privately and be taken up into it.

It is uncertain what will become of your silver tray–

not to be known by any of us

the only evidence you were ever here:

perhaps slowly buried beneath forest floorboards,

or laid to rest in the bed of a silver lake,

or melted in a forest’s cleansing burn,

or we could hardly say what.

What does it matter?

We’ll have gone.

We’ll have left it to see its own end.