Rummage Sale
My uncle died three days
before his 92nd birthday.
Now, we sort through belongings,
dismantling his life, offer gems
to the next people maneuvering
their way through the years.
I hurry to my parents’ house,
set up tables, hang clothes
on racks, price tools
that belonged to my uncle.
Geese honk and fly south,
synchronized, as if taught
this special feat to amaze
those of us here below.
I’m about to hang my uncle’s red shirt
as a lone goose flies overhead.
It’s more vocal, flies closer
than the others. I glance at the shirt
in my hands, my uncle’s favorite.
*
Robin Wright lives in Southern Indiana. Her work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, The Beatnik Cowboy, Loch Raven Review, ONE ART, Spank the Carp, The New Verse News, Rat’s Ass Review, Fevers of the Mind, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her first chapbook, Ready or Not, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.
I like how the geese are worked into the poem, into the rummage sale, into the life of the speaker and thoughts about her uncle, things he left behind that, like the geese, will “fly away.”
Thank you, Peter!