Shredder Before the Big Move
Take the hum of it:
it cuts my life to strips.
The expired credit card
with a grinding sound,
yellowed 1987 tax forms,
sliced bits of past,
appliance guarantee
for a refrigerator
I no longer own, pile
of letters become bits of dust.
Amnesia machine,
black, reflective, pulsating.
Records for the ‘79 Maverick
with chrome column shift,
clutch always going bad,
so I junked it. Orange
Dane County, Wisconsin
court envelope
with divorce papers
I’ve long wanted to destroy.
Everything comes from atoms.
Everything returns to atoms.
Erase time. Erase
letters of recommendation—
nothing to recommend now.
Forgetting is so much sweeter
than remembering.
College paper on Greek math,
pythagorean theorem drawings
now in fading pencil.
Martin Dickinson is the author of three collections of poems, My Concept of Time (Finishing Line Press, 2014), Life List Notes (Sligo Creek Press, 2021) and, together with Maryland poet, Nancy Allinson, What a Windstorm Teaches (Sligo Creek Press, 2019). Dickinson’s poetry explores the illusion of solidity in our changing world as well as the otherwise unmapped country of gusts and storms within us and without us. He was poet of the month for May, 2015 for the on- line journal Blue Heron Review. His poems appear in California Quarterly, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, the Russian language weekly, Kontinent (in Russian translation) and in numerous print and on-line journals. Dickinson lives in Friendship Heights, Washington, D.C.