CLEANING THE ROOMS

I would not have understood in my younger

and more selfish years, that when we agree to love,

we agree also to the dust and drudgery

of it all -- the stacking of cups and dinner plates

like so much sculpture, the endless knots

of hair, both human and animal, spun

and discarded with the heavy wet clumps of litter,

our grease-streaked reflections gazing from

the tea kettle, as if from a great distance.

Nor could I have imagined returning,

after so many years away, to clean and sort through

this long-neglected museum that once

contained our life together, while your siblings

in the next room calmly discuss legal documents,

final arrangements, salvage and dispersal,

the practical tasks that must be tended to,

and are done, it must be said, with no less love.

I could not have imagined being anything other

than young within these rooms --

prone to drink and bad decisions as we were,

but also to affection, laughter, the secret language

granted only through time and intimacy.

But now time has found you, love, here alone,

taken you from the bed we once shared, the room

in which we held each other for warmth

on winter nights when the antique radiators

offered nothing but cool silence.

I want to slow all of this down: stretch out

in the rickety papasan, turning within my palm

every thrift store bauble and picture frame,

to trace with my fingertips the grooves

of the old oak writing desk, want simply to breathe

you in and out before this sacred mess is gone.

But we, the living, are nothing if not efficient

today -- boxing up your old CorningWare,

your well-organized stacks of books,

taking from their wooden hangers the sweaters

and dresses that still bear your slender shape --

sweeping away thirty-four years of

your life in a few short hours.

I take down the Steiglitz print, the Klimt painting

I gave you for your birthday a lifetime ago,

the cracked and yellowing photo albums,

the red brick of a candle you never lit,

walk slowly up the block toward Dale Street --

more slowly than necessary -- pausing at the corner

as though I might see you in passing,

just back from the co-op or coffee shop.

But only the crows are out today,

fat-bellied, with neither fear nor apology,

weighing down the branches,

declaring themselves again and again,

the exclamations of their voices impossible to place,

their shadows living, and permanent.

CROSSING THE ROOM

 

In the days since

your death, the cat has

suddenly begun to

run away when I rise

to cross the room,

as if I were a storm cloud

threatening to rain my

grief down upon it,

as if the tip of my boot

were about to inflict

the kick in the gut I have

felt for the past week,

as if I were anything other

than a man, slow moving,

ordinary, crossing from

one room to the next.

LATE IN THE EVENING

 

I would say more, but

I'm running out of words

to shift the silence,

and out of room

in this house for all

these ghosts.

EARTHQUAKES

 

The old house in Hugo, Minnesota, sat along

Highway 61, and the Northern Pacific line,

whose trains shook the boards to their foundations

again and again throughout the night,

those eerie blue-tinged lights flashing from room

to room, interrogating the darkness

of our sleep, the throaty warning of its whistle

which seemed at once so far and so near.

The walls groaned and the windows trembled

in their ill-fitting frames, the unsteady raft

of my childhood bed shifting course upon the floor.

I imagined that this must be what an earthquake

felt like, what my older sisters reported back

when they visited from California -- the unexpected

shifting of the world's half-sleeping body,

throwing books from their unsteady shelves,

family photos leaving ghost-prints on the eggshell walls.

But their quakes were rare by comparison;

ours arrived nightly, without fail, reminding us

that we couldn't rest for long, and that even here

in the great and frozen Midwest the ground

beneath us was never as certain as we imagined.

Things were always shifting, little tremors everywhere.

It was best to keep moving, and we did.