Antiques & Collectibles

For C. G.

1

Remember how you wrote to me when
Your father died, that it was difficult
Navigating the vacancy: I have repeated
This phrase to others and rehearsed it often
To myself in comprehending a dying
That has mattered most to me.

I think now that we are engaged in such
Navigation continually, not at the intensity
Of bereavement – though most brought
Home in this loss – but as a necessary fact
Of being: that our lives are led always
In territories of void and absence.

That there is much already given us
In the surroundings, relationships, ways of life
We step into is obvious, yet we know too
That all that is, is yet little of what was
And might have been existent for us:
The most of what would be, being long gone.

2

I think of our dead and of the paintings,
Plays, works of thought and verse, and all else
Excellent or treasured once, counted as missing,
And that we pass through life ever amid
Gaps and remainders, leavings, as now
Within this antiques and second-hand shop.

Surely it is from such an emporium
That we retrieve much with which we
Furnish our lives – laying our hands on ideas
As we would on a set of glasses or of china –
And finding these, fine and serviceable once,
So often chipped with use, incomplete.

And death – the idea of death – may be
Some such thing, whose history of handling
In other minds has left it worthless for us,
So that it lies with the clutter and dust of once
Meaningful things, from which few pick it up
With sufficiency, most moving on.

In our hands, at the moments of feeling,
Of its consideration, we turn the idea over
Amid notions of passing on, going beyond,
Homecoming, sought and earned peace,
But as something in its centre unknowable,
As handling this vase is to hold its emptiness.

3

But externals are not the point. They
Never are. The death of someone loved
Empties a place in the materiality of being
Which is never again filled, but remains
A fault in the whole, a pressing sense
Of the damaged, the actuality pitifully spoiled.

And does the heart – that belonging to us all –
Grasping what is given only to depart, and
Wearied in the attempt again and again
To accustom itself to loss – does the heart,
In its bafflement, its repeated desolation,
Does it tire, learn to feel less and less?

Then death, its fact, would in time recede
From meaning, would be as this a thing standing
At the back of other objects, left there
With rarely a will to stretch a hand to it:
Something obviously unwanted, put comfortably
Out of reach, of some past use but none to us.

4

Or is it that we look on such masses of clutter –
These shelves of silver, porcelain, glass –
And overwhelmed by material profusion,
The dense reality of things – here the elegant,
There the ugly – see all the stuff of human and
Other making, and take this to be the whole?

Everywhere, things. So many objects crowd
The random aisles through which we walk:
So much is brought into the world
That it would seem every vacancy we have
Can be closed over, and we need merely
Select this item, that article, and be contented.

But here we meet the commonest of crockery:
The certain knowledge that there is nothing
Of furnishing or utility, no commodity, item,
In our surrounds, to assuage, complete
A place in us that remains untouched
By any extent or richness in our purchasing.

How should it be otherwise? We make our way
In life through this store of things on offer –
Some of beauty, rarity, elegance – most
Outmoded, unneeded, of no lasting value –
A world of distraction that we discount
In knowing love, and exit finally in death.

5

Like these once familiar, valued dinner sets,
We, as things, are made to be run through,
Reduced, and in this state to join with these
In a world of the diminished, the falling short,
The makeshift, a place of parts, never
Of the whole, composed of deficiencies, absences.

All these accumulations belonged to others once,
Were viewed with pride or meaning, and
Those who bought them first – as gifts,
Within family life or marriage, to decorate
Or bring some object of value to a home –
They have cast them out or they are dead.

The objects displayed here have no existence
In themselves, but come into life, into our world,
With the thought or feeling they inspire,
And no such otherness attaches to these now –
They have returned to an original state,
To that of no being, but that of dead things.

6

So too every person, like everything that has
Been made – every work of crystal, ceramic,
Fabric, other composition – enters into life in love:
Is transformed, as every loved thing is,
Into being, the object becoming something living,
And dies when love loses its attachment.

This is the only death, and it must be such
For all the dead if they and we are no more
Than the stuff we are surrounded by – mere things
Representing, mimicking, all those who dying
Pass away from love, and lie like these objects
In a place to the side of past significance.

But love too, like death, is a vacancy – no object,
Nothing in perception, but itself a rent, a tear
In the material – a space between this object
And that, where there is no filling piece,
Nothing actual that would complete the whole:
It is a gap in the given that we fill ourselves.

7

What life if we are nothing more than things
Like these, passing through the hands of time,
Then to be put down? Then there is, can be,
No abstract life, no meaning, and the artefact here –
Well-conceived, well-made – has no more
Value than another piece of disposable junk.

And what meaning more than love? What
Other faculty so completes our being?
Love in attachment to another, love
In the workings of hand and mind, the love
That produced these engravings, ceramic bowls,
This figurine, the love that valued them.

All these may last longer than each of us,
But they too ultimately come to nothing,
Yet what outlives them is the love
That thought and formed them:
The love that, once embraced, bonds us
To each other, into meaning, into life.

And you and I, surely, know what it is
To love in indifference to time and
Circumstance, even to being together:
You who were, in your words, just a girl
When we met, and we, now decades and
Much else since, never lovers, are lovers yet.

8

As the abstract, the non-material, in ourselves
Has its life – has the object of its desire
And fulfilment – in what is immaterial
In another, so we love and are loved beyond
The physical, breakable, the deteriorating
In our being, so embracing the imperishable.

The things we see and handle here – all that’s
Made – enter into the world and pass
From it wholly as we ourselves cannot,
Who are not whole things like these,
But only partly objects, and carry always,
Consist of, and enclose, an essential vacancy.

Hollow things ourselves, we wander here
Amid the remains and voids of time, and
What we love in another is the wholly insubstantial
Together with, and more than, what is physical:
As handling and admiring the form and painting
Of this antique vase, we hold its air within.

9

Then can there be any death, any exacting loss,
Where there is love? For it is love, nothing
Of the real in itself, that is able to fill –
That is able, in exact matching, to complete –
The insubstantial, the incorporeal, the fundamental
Immateriality embodied in ourselves.

In embracing the unworldliness of love –
Its existent otherness – we choose to die
In part to the world, and see that death too,
Like love, is a mere parting from materiality –
This jumble of things – is our complete acceptance
Of the non-existent, the vacancy in the real.

For we carry the nature of death within us
As we do love – as both fact and choice –
Each a disjunction, a breach, in the world of things:
Things that are as the porcelain and paint
Of this attractive vase, a fact of materiality,
Picked up in passing and left on the shelf.

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