That emotions should be christened for their object
And not abstractly for their content. Fear and love
Would become 'a dangerous crossing' or just 'you.'
Perhaps, somebody suggested, we should point
And thus avoid misunderstanding and the ills
That generally come from saying what one means.
There was a school of thought in opposition,
Of course - there always is - which said
That the old names were best and meant just what they said.
Nearby some people were discussing nothing.
As
far as I recall their conversation,
Some maintained that nothingness was zero
Or at least that they conceived it so,
While certain others insisted that they felt
The absence of sensation as a lack,
A positive negation, so to speak,
Dissatisfaction, disappearance, disillusion
Or even the destruction of the object,
And said that nothing equalled minus one.
All about the furniture stood, dumb,
The most expressive that I ever saw,
It had the grateful look of having been
Rescued from oblivion: those chairs
Had lived in disgrace, underground, for years,
And that inlaid table, too, an exile
Returned from somebody's attic
declasse
In company with the out of tune piano
And a distinctly down at heels
duehesse.
As for the lamps: every one had started
Life as something other than a lamp,
As a typewriter, a trumpet or a doll,
And been converted, willy-nilly lucifer.
Who put them there? What stranded housewife furnished
This most impersonal of places
With the heirlooms of her private fancy,
Or did I dream that they and I were there?
