WHERE THE OLD HOUSE STOOD

 

After your funeral I walked, by memory, to the old house,

as if I might somehow find you lingering there,

as if the years had waited all this time, unchanging.

But the old house, dear brother, was nowhere to be found.

A new one stood in its place -- charming and respectable, freshly

painted, with an impossibly green and manicured lawn.

Nothing you would have recognized. Only the trees

seemed familiar, the old and stately oaks grown older still,

the fan dance of their shadows wavering at my feet.

They would know you, I'm sure, as the lake water would,

as I barely had time to before you were gone.

We are becoming part of the past, dear brother,

a world which we had no idea we were creating as kids;

and it's something I can just about see if I narrow my eyes,

the way a rough sketch hidden beneath a painting

can be seen when held up to a particular kind of light.

Would you mourn this loss with me, I wonder.

Or would you perhaps be grateful, as I am, that no one now

can sleep where we slept, dream where we dreamed;

no one will smoke unfiltered Camels on the slanted roof,

the chilly autumn sunlight looking on in silence.

Those rooms where we laughed, where we fought, talking

long into the night, stand within these walls of words --

every door and window intact, every creak and groan of that

shifting house familiar. It all belongs to us now.

DREAM DOOR

 

In the dream there is a small hidden door in my mother's bedroom, the kind that was once used for ice deliveries in old apartment buildings, or a crawl space leading to a tangle of wires, spiderwebs, and rusty pipes. But when I bend low to open it, the exact same room appears on the other side, the same bedside table and lamp, the same red bedspread, the same bottles lined up like a miniature skyline. In fact, the whole interior of the house is there, in reverse. Though I am very young, I can walk through it by memory, taking a left where normally I would go right. I can hear and smell coffee percolating from the kitchen, a television sounding low and far away. But nothing happens in this dream. It is merely a feeling of calmness I have walked into, the very strangeness of the mundane. No one is shouting here. No one is leaving. There are no sirens wailing outside the window, no red lights reflecting against the glass. It is impossible for me to tell if this is before, or after, or never was. It is a dream that I tell to no one, for there is nothing to tell. But after I wake, it's a dream I immediately want to get back to. But of course I can't return. I can never return.