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, thecellar?)
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
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