The House
The
house stills.
She is gone − a slipknot of
generation lets go the rooms,
the past, its ghosts
devolved to son and daughter,
these
others of the blood.
I
kept a few things, letters
from an age of letters, my
own to her
my first year away, and
older, a photograph of my father
in 1922, there with him
tandem on the scooter, my
uncle, not yet three.
Other
things, a glass bowl
ringed
with freehand waves, and Pickwick Papers,
the edition
loose in its binding, ruby
leather crumbled.
The
house stills, the sickroom, its drawers
of medicines, of resignation
run-out,
the ticking centre of the
place
cleared with her clothes,
those sheer, bold prints promising
subtropical paths into that
farther dark.
The
jewellery, knots of yellow-green enamels
granddaughters divvy…
And
my father’s paintings, his primitive style
now stylish: oils of
finches, waxwings,
lifted
from the frames, reveal others still bright, on black boughs
wedges of wild colour
set back-to-back behind the
first.
He
was working in the kitchen, the sable-tip’s chrome yellow
edging the tucked wing
fifty years ago.
Images,
flying through a mirror…
In
the fires of this last evening
we recommend the sunken
step, the mouse
that mastered the attic
maze, and too, the edgy door,
its stump of swollen grain
stuck hard, and too,
the cobweb in the hall, the
mortal damp,
the ancient-bone brittleness
of maples in the yard.
In a round of stone, where
blown sparks fire the tinder,
we gather to an absence,
against the dark
coming down.
A child chases through the
firelight, maple switch waving.
She is one of us, flying
through the mirror
we made, that is
made, somehow
of our being here.
Her stick wand
figure-eights, touching each,
one by one.
Against
insinuations of goodbye, the house stills.
We
have gone.
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