My Grandmother’s Bureau

Old people’s homes, in my experience,
always seem to have a large bureau.
A cabinet on four legs
like a possessed piece of furniture
in a Disney cartoon, perhaps which once
had been an old French butler, called Renee.

My grandmother’s featured rows of ornaments,
little china houses and Dutch children drawing
their water from wells. There was also a section
for alcoholic drinks, a cabinet whose door
could hang from chains like a drawbridge and
so serve as a bartender’s mixing station.

Such items must have seemed so chic in 1955,
when class was something you could buy,
or at least tell yourself you’d bought.
“How sophisticated, dear!” I imagine my grandmother
said, seeing such a many-drawer-ed thing
be drawn on at a neighbour’s house,

“I must get one for me and John...”
My other grandmother’s was stuffed with books,
even though she didn’t read except in her last years
before dementia hit. A woman’s thing, were bureaus.
I suppose. A servant’s box, to hold a woman’s life.
Her things of joy, of drunkenness, of service and of love.