Vday!

Thoughts on Unpacking, Thom Gunn


Unpacking in the raw new rooms, I clear,
Or try to clear, a space for us, that we
May cultivate an ease of moving here
With no encumbrance near,
In amplitude. But something hinders me:

Where do those go, these knick-knacks I forgot?
-- Gadgets we bought and kept, thinking perhaps
They might e useful someday, and a lot
Of others that were not:
Bent keys, Italian grammars, Mickey Mouse caps.

And there are worse grotesques that, out of sight,
Unpacked, unlabelled, somehow followed too:
The urgencies we did not share, the spite
Of such and such a night,
Poses, mistakes? an unclean residue

That drift, one after another, till I find
They have filled the space I carefully prepared;
The sagging shapes I thought we left behind
crawl out within the mind
seeming to sneer This is the past you shared.

I take a broom to them; but when I thrust
Round the diminished luggage, some roll back,
Surviving from my outbreak of disgust
As balls of hair and dust
Made buoyant with a kind of fictive lack

I need your help with these. They rest unseen
in furniture we know, and plot a changing
To grey confusion of the space between.
Now, as I sweep it clean,
I realise that love is an arranging.