Antebellum House Party by Terrance Hayes

Antebellum House Party

To make the servant in the corner unobjectionable

Furniture, we must first make her a bundle of tree parts

Axed and worked to confidence. Oak-jawed, birch-backed,

Cedar-skinned, a pillowy bosom for the boss infants,

A fine patterned cushion the boss can fall upon.

Furniture does not pine for a future wherein the boss

Plantation house will be ransacked by cavalries or Calvary.

A kitchen table can, in the throes of a yellow-fever outbreak,

Become a cooling board holding the boss wife’s body.

It can on ordinary days also be an ironing board holding

Boss garments in need of ironing. Tonight it is simply a place

For a white cup of coffee, a tin of white cream. Boss calls

For sugar and the furniture bears it sweetly. Let us fill the mouth

Of the boss with something stored in the pantry of a house

War, decency, nor bedevilled storms can wipe from the past.

Furniture’s presence should be little more than a warm feeling

In the den. The dog staring into the fireplace imagines each log

Is a bone that would taste like a spiritual wafer on his tongue.

Let us imagine the servant ordered down on all fours

In the manner of an ottoman whereupon the boss volume

Of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America” can be placed.

Antebellum residents who possessed the most encyclopedic

Bookcases, luxurious armoires, and beds with ornate cotton

Canopies often threw the most photogenic dinner parties.

Long after they have burned to ash, the hound dog sits there

Mourning the succulent bones he believes the logs used to be.

Imagination is often the boss of memory. Let us imagine

Music is radiating through the fields as if music were reward

For suffering. A few of the birds Audubon drew are now extinct.

The Carolina parakeet, passenger pigeon, and Labrador duck

No longer nuisance the boss property. With so much

Furniture about, there are far fewer woods. Is furniture’s fate

As tragic as the fate of an axe, the part of a tree that helps

Bring down more upstanding trees? The best furniture

Can stand so quietly in a room that the room appears empty.

If it remains unbroken, it lives long enough to become antique.