Poem for the Day: Lost Property by Tracy Ryan

Lost Property

To be alone in the wide room                                                                     

In the house’s crooked elbow, turning point                                                

For extensions as the family grew                                                               

And grew – and grew – to be alone in the one room                                     

Nobody needed now, though it might be resumed                                       

Like land, for guests or blow-ins, at any moment,                                         

Without notice (and that was part of                                                           

The appeal, the very tenuous feel of the place), to play there                        

At five or six to be immersed though not safe among the things                    

That proceeded you, immediate and limitless,                                             

Everything already there, the way the world went on                                   

Before you were thought of, the flux, and your small-child                            

Leisure for introspection while others shinnied trees for the same                 

Sense of endless outlook, here,                                                                  

In this would-be attic brought down to earth, whose breath                         

Was frosty on Mother Shipton’s well, holding the tossed refuse                     

Of older siblings, stages shrugged off: limp tutus, ping as dropped               

Gum blossom, too big, though you stepped                                                

Into them and stood, as if in a fairy ring you might animate:                        

Satin and tapshoes, toe-shoes from a sister’s long gone bit-part                   

In Hans Christian Andersen, poems called Off the Shelf                               

That you avidly grabbed for your own, puzzled                                          

At faded marginal doodles in real ink:                                                        

Dark ocarina whose holes you could never master,                                     

Bakelite cracked, spookily fake-organic,                                                    

As if a new kind of reptile had laid it,                                                         

And a distant, shadowy instrument, lipped, where fingers should sit,            

With verdigris your father later chastised you for rubbing –                          

An oboe perhaps – resisting your grip, but venting                                     

A slow corruption in you as descant,                                                         

Its distant kin in this vast orchestral silence:

Strange octagon you toyed with that would never quite close or open,

Squeeze box, little lung resisting pressure, push and draw, your hands

Impeded from fully parting or meeting, stretching

In musical secretion, cat’s cradle ectoplasm,

Crimped membrane so vulnerable to puncture,

It made you wince, lantern-thin but giving sound

For illumination. At last: harmonica, cupped, bracketed but not

For all that an afterthought, heart of the whole unpeopled

Space, for the way it moulded to your own small wheeze

And gave it a different life, if a pleasure to the player only,

Pleasure to make your mouth water, metal, felt, and papery

Velvet, though your brother might shudder

At the old spit he imagined pooled there,

To your it was honeycomb,

Striving to isolate each note, then giving up,

As if you had many voices at once, speaking in chords,

And could make yourself heard.

- Tracy Ryan