Everything's in the lake

It took me a while to find a poem that to any degree expresses how I am feeling right now. And even this one does not fully capture it. Instead:

“Let the image float inside you; pass lightly,” wrote French literary critic Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve, “the slightest idea of it will suffice for you.”

Dignity in the Home

by Betsy Brown

All the chairs and the long brown couch just lay

down on the floor in a line and the thin

curtains joined them, sort of on the side

or fluttering down onto them and I watched

thinking this is the kind of loneliness I

should’ve known about and this is nonsense: I object.

But the furniture line was so heavy

it went right out the door and some of my

neighbors’ lamps joined in, the tails

of extension cords and paths of towels and bedding

went straight down the lawn to the lake where

even my toothbrush and coffee mug with the cats

on it had slunk, so dejected it didn’t

even matter they were in the water with some

cold rocks and a clam. All were loaded down

with the despair so poignant in furnishings, each

I tried to coax back into the house, gathering

the alarm clock and frying pan from the lake,

but, almost politely, they moved from

my hands back down to that cold home

with the fierce clam, who guarded them

from my confusion. They were so quiet

about it, I love them. My pajamas floated

with such purpose, reached for the laces of one of my

old tennis shoes out nearly to the reef,

reached without expectation.