That House
August 22, 2005
Do you remember that house,the one with all the floors sliding east (the famous-to-me direction of your auspicious birth)?
It was almost one hundred years old,and I think someone called it grandfathered, as though it could turn over new leaves.
It had a breakfast nook we never usedbecause the kitchen was built in the time of cold cupboards and wood-burning stoves, and the refrigerator broke out pregnantly from the wall if we didn't back it into the nook.
There was this cheap linoleum in the bathroomthat I refused to get rid of even though it peeled up in broad strokes around the radiator, because it was six-by-six-inch black and white checkers, and I had thought about that kind of floor since I was a little kid because I liked the symmetry the squares imposed.
The cracks in the wallswere going to be incorporated into pictures instead of re-plastered over, because it seemed to me that it was the plaster that had the problem, and painting meant that new cracks could mean new branches and not the brokenness of new cracks.
We decided we couldn't stay if we had a family,so we moved to make room, and then that baby never came.
When we packed everything upand wiped the last of our fingerprints off the doorframe, I could still see in my mind the things I would do there if we stayed, but that baby was not in my mind any more than a distant relative that we never met whose Christmas letter had been foisted upon us by my mother.
So, I wasn't very sad about that baby,but I always missed that house, and I wonder if that baby had come if I would sometimes still have wished that we'd kept that house instead.
SUBSCRIBE TO THIS WEBSITE
When You Are Away
August 8, 2005
You are the moments in between:that space in the hall
just after I forgot to close the door;
the second the water turned cold
after jumping the pot to burn my hand;
when my fingers hovered loosely,
quesioning their choice of keys.
In those seconds of indecision, you slide in neatly,
you are the phantom limb,
the sudden scent from the pillowcase,
the remembered childhood hymn.
When you are away,
you become
the instant when your lips
would radiate kisses
before my next move.