Through the Sun-Stained Curtains at the End of a Long, Long Day

Through the Sun-Stained Curtains at the End of a Long, Long Day

                                                                     

                                                                      Memory

is the simplest form of prayer.  Today you glow

like warm precious lumps of amber in my mind.

From "Black Mountain" by Marge Percy

 If it’s true—about memory being

the simplest form

of prayer, what happens

when memory becomes

a thin linen

tea towel

and the tea, tepid,

poured and misplaced

next to the burning

cigarette filter, next

to the day’s

unopened mail—

the door’s open just

that her cats come

and go

with the flies, with the

close of summer

wind, with the tide

going out,

half a mile away.  Earlier,

when she first came,

she’d clam, the flats

briny as a third child in quick

succession, and that

one up the beech

with a spoon, no shoes,

sunk like gulls who

try to glide

but only get as far

as their squawk in

a south-east

breeze.  There’s

a half a peck in her

roller.  I remember.

Does that mean

I’m praying, simply,

or simply because

it’s clear today? But today

there is no tea. 

The linen, pissed

on by the feral

cats, has been turned out

of the room.

All that’s left

are those pocked black-

crusted scars

what her stray

cigarette embers

burned into the sheets

that still dress

her bed,

that still mark

a Hansel path

from the kitchen

to the bedroom,

then beyond

though I don’t know

where.  I simply

don’t…

A roof over our heads...

A roof over our heads...

You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound.
Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks
barbed and drawing blood with their caress.
                                                                from “My mother’s body” by Marge Percy

Don’t we all?  Don’t we all live
in unsettled houses, their frames
adjusting to the seasons
with much more aplomb than we
do or even can?
                                the May lilac waft, or, going back two
                                months, the frozen clothesline warp
                                bowed low in the still fisted, elder-fierce March
                                or ahead again, rain in the cistern’s  
                                generous edge of the wefted scum of bugs?

Windows.  Who wants to see anything more
                                than with the level eyes of the first
                                floor?
                                Consider the second or the attic?
                                (and looking up, the
                                cellar?)
                                How we rake
                                every sunrise to gauge
                                the day’s approaching cliché:
                                a deer in the new lettuce
                                a crow on the light pole?

Doors, then are throats, doors and stairs
                                the course down the middle, the up      
                                or down
                                a growl or purr, a
                                pulse besiege increase
                                of dirty
                                dishes
                                of puckered
                                bed covers
                                and thrown down wet face
                                cloths and
                                towels (warm melting soap)

                                It takes it all
                                in pace, all this: and the way
                                into the basement, the way the swing
                                of the door rides low, the way it sticks to
                                then chafes the kitchen floor.  In time there’ll be
                                a scar, a perfect half
                                (or most of it) arc from
                                the threshold to the first step
                                away or toward.  The only

                                evidence of unremitting friction.  And listen, when
                                it all begins to burn, two things meeting
                                to rub themselves together like sex
                                it’s fire, and the first thing to catch
                                isn’t the proverbial curtain—No,
                                the first thing will be the floor
                                beneath the low swinging door. 
                                Even beneath that, between ceilings/floors
                                a suspended capsule, hoarded ore


waiting for nothing at all but a moment
                                where stroking becomes smoke becomes
                                glow becomes flame, moment after moment
                                floating up out of the cracks.
                                But not just smoke.  Voices.  Voices, voices
                                of the long dead,
                                (or the upstairs dying)
                                resurrected by the simple
                                continuous
                                opening going down opening coming back up