Toby Douglass
Commended - 2025 Tower Poetry Competition, 'Roots'
Secondary Succession (or The Antique Shop)
Dead things go down, I’m told.
Granules of detritus, as sand in an hourglass
Filter neatly through topsoil, downward,
By an irresistible gravitropism, downward,
To the obscure stratum that lies somewhere
Between the subsoil and the bedrock.
Similarly, things dead
With unwantedness, or things whose usefulness
Has seeped from a crack from where they were dropped on the floor,
Go down, sinking heavy as logs to the bottom
Of a cardboard box. Lichened by dust, they lie
Surrounded by things necrotic with disinterest.
But dead things can be resurrected, recycled
By roots which probe earthwards like fingers,
Gathering the shiny, the sentimental, the silver casting
A lifeline for the detrital stuff, clutter, and
Things of mineral value. Nothing holier
Than osmosis, bringing the dead, unwanted things
Through a peculiar membrane, one defined
By an invisible chemistry, not the sensible
Measures of pH, nor salinity, but the base
Human ability to measure the unmeasurable,
Attach a value to the valueless, and utilise
A quirk in language, making dead things invaluable.
The shop’s roots are under ground in
The basement, where communities of mulchy boxes house
These things that have been saved from time, and time again
It is for some to be rehabilitated, carried up
A phloemic staircase by a pair of hands, leaf-veined
And gentle, they plant the things on a branching shelf.
An antique shop is not a cemetery. The low ceilings
Seem unbefitting for a greenhouse, but it is
Museums, mausoleums, which insist on grandeur. After
All the history there is great, but
It is lifeless, too. Petrified bonsais, curated, celebrated,
Signify impossibly weighty, and utterly impersonal things.
The shop shelters a million small histories, each of them
In a kind of stasis, between owners, between times.
Their history is living, unfinished, tended by a million
Greenthumbs. Patience and confidence both infuse the dusty,
Sluggish air, as if the things know that all it takes is
A fleeting glance, the gleam of snagged interest.
A rotation of keys, the unsealing of a glass cabinet.
A rustle of a paper bag. The farewell chime of a doorbell.
Before the dead things find themselves useful again,
Cautiously replanted, little unknown scions
Of living history.