The Poetry Project

On Burglary (or what’s been taken away)

Elizabeth Robinson

What is given, I clean carefully.

And what is taken away,

I struggle to remember.

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All that is stolen remains selfish: variably audible to memory.

What I have cleaned, have washed up, I place carefully

away. To hide something is to prevent it from being stolen.

But then also to forget where it has been hidden.

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It is hard some days keep washing, to get

out of bed and take a shower.

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After a while, if you cease to bathe,

your hair adjusts to this condition

and no longer looks dirty.

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Keeping is cleanliness,

and realizing all that has been stolen

helps to prove that theft

has its own taxonomical system.

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Teleological. Dirtied teoleology.

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We remember what we forgot was taken in order
to categorize its cost, of which the thing itself has no recollection.

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To re-impose the cleanliness of order proves

memory as insurance

that will reimburse a portion of the loss.

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Theft induces not only loss

but lostness.

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I have lost my taxonomy, my soap and water, and my way.

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Were we to rank them,

the losses of highest value are those that have come closest to the body—

jewelry,

hands, caresses, a voice, even

the gaze.

A smell now gone extinct.

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Ironically, we would have to acknowledge that these, by their very proximity to the
body are the items that are most unclean.

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(I do not know exactly where I am now staying.

Only that

the mockingbird obtrudes at 4 a.m. with its perfect memory for what it has

heard, though what it has stolen

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has negative value because its memory is so impeccable.

That is, there are forms and forms

of reproduction.

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I wake up to find tiny grains of black sand adhering to the sheets.)

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I wanted back my eyeglasses and my address book

but also the belief that soaking in a tub of hot water would take away something that

I wanted taken away.

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Politeness is a form of cleanliness that has very little efficacy.

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I would like the words back which have been impounded indefinitely

as evidence.

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What I notice in the aftermath of all

that’s been taken away, like license, is exactly this pollution of memory.

How I am implicated in guilt of what I did not do. How I recall protecting the

thing by secreting it. What color,

I was asked, was the thing that was stolen, when

I had conscientiously bleached it. And the half

that was left behind lost value because it was no longer complete.

Issue 11

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