There is a story behind the cabinets.
When I was young enough to climb inside the smaller one
I would. I was no bigger then than the smaller
of two cabinets my granddad helped to lacquer
when he himself was not much bigger than I was.
Not much happened then, & then a lot of things, but none
of this is the story behind the cabinets. No one
told it to me. Instead they’d say,
‘there is a story behind these cabinets’
through the keyhole whose key was never found.
My granddad hunted rabbits by staging irresistible salads
on large, flat rocks, over-seasoned with pepper
so the rabbit’s inquisitive sniffing would make it sneeze
& launch its eggshell skull into the rock.
This is a thing that happened. The cabinets are almost
as beautiful as the trees they used to be,
or so I like to think having never seen them.
It must have killed my granddad’s granddad’s horse
to lug those trunks out from the forest, or so
I like to think. It must have crushed their little cart:
I picture the barrel-tops repurposed for its wheels popping off
like champagne corks. Everything was something,
once. The air inside the cabinet grew small
around me. In those years meat was scarce.