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.

MY FATHER'S FACE

 

How many times, during those early years

of childhood, did I imagine the angled ridge of his jawline,

sharp with stubble, rough to the touch,

or freshly shaved, pinkish and smooth, smelling

of Aqua Velva aftershave, rye whiskey,

the faint residue of Lucky Strikes.

How I imagined, too, his ears, their lobes thick

and dangling like bells, his nose -- sometimes wide,

sometimes narrow -- dark pores oily with sweat --

and, of course, I tried hard to see his eyes,

their size and shape, what light might have been

captured there, the level of their questioning,

the depth of their feeling or recognition.

My mother, having not a single photograph

to show, said only that if I wanted to see

my father's face, I could just look in the mirror.

But to me, it might as well have been

the face of God, Jesus, or Job, those mythical

faces seen only in my imagination.

It was, after all, the face that my mother

once held, smiled back at, and breathed in deeply,

if only for that moment, the face that would

refuse, again and again, to look upon my own.

Though it was hard to imagine even

a narrow smile upon that face; and equally as hard

to conjure a look of sorrow or regret

brought forth by the burden of his leaving.

It was, I realize now, the face that was

always there, face beneath my own, long before I could

see or remember, its own shroud and palimpsest,

forever turning and turning away,

even now as I write these lines, a mask

of interiors silent as river stone, unraveling on sight,

a tale to be believed only by its absence.

LITTLE TREE

 

When my daughter was born, not

so very long ago -- entering this world early,

small enough to cradle in the palm

of my outstretched hand -- a friend gifted

our family a fig tree planted in her name,

thousands of miles from the cool, white hospital rooms

we called home during those first few weeks.

This morning, the rockets again drawing

their wordless script across that ancient landscape,

obliterating much, erasing the prayers

of the many and the few, their message

unmistakable, familiar, everything seems closer,

visceral, as sudden and startling as a punch.

I think again of that little tree, giver of

shade and light, respite, oxygen, that seemingly

endless ladder of knots and hidden doorways

for young, skinny arms and legs to climb,

stretching its coils of roots tentatively into a soil

continually scarred and shuddering with uncertainty;

little tree, little lamp, beginning and ending of

every fable, making its way -- as it must --

upward into the bright expanse of sky.

MY DAUGHTER RISES EARLY

 

My daughter rises early, and after gulping down

her breakfast cereal, begins to rummage

through her large collection of stuffed animals,

piled one on top of another in an oversized

plastic bucket, spilling over from the edges of

her bed, hiding silently in dusty corners.

She asks for two large bags, having decided, between

breakfast and getting dressed for school,

that most -- if not all of them -- must go.

So it's goodbye to the giggling Elmo, to raccoon,

and to Bear, who we left that time, and found again

safe and sound at the desk of our public library,

goodbye to Fred and Angelina, that kind pair of cats,

who must -- she reminds me -- stay together,

lest they be unhappy for the next child they are with;

the idea of another kid finding joy and comfort

makes her happy, which makes me feel somewhat

embarrassed by my sorrow, this sense of loss,

as if something living were being shown the door,

their painted eyes looking back at the rooms

they are leaving so soon, this kingdom of childhood

they, too, thought would last just a bit longer.