The Interior of Empty Rooms

The Interior of Empty Rooms

Yesterday they were tearing her room apart,

but only in words.  The teacher of foreign

students will be able to live

there for a few more months.  They’re deciding,

maybe they already have, what to keep

and what to throw away.

I can tell they want to do it all without her,

that hungry cat voice ribboning between

the rising and falling feet

of the owner who just came home. 

They’re all anxious, distracted—some by

a future of new paint and new floors,

some by a replacement, a new program,

some by the last big spending before

retirement.  But the teacher—listen,

there’s need in her voice, and desire

to do it all on her own.  It’s like going home

while your mother’s in hospice:

and with your sisters and pens and post-its

you write and mark to save for this

cousin, that aunt.  Remember how

precious it was to see your child self bent over

a little private spiral pad, the mystery

of the before penmanship loops and o’s?

Remember the torn off and scattered

thoughts of clues and their dead ends?  How

beneath the couch, months of this game

became a detective lift and hunt—rugs—

chair cushions, bed skirts?  How you never know

now if you found whatever toy had been ‘hidden’?

So you write with the same distraction

all adults who scope the future have, the same

distance as a cataloger at Good Will: separate, 

sort, sell.  Trinkets of someone else’s life.  Some

still have those post it notes stuck

on the bottom: a niece’s name, the one

who never made it home after the hospice bed

was filled with someone else, different

pictures to end the day gazing at.  And who

ever buys the donated, a book maybe, will open

it and read the flap:  To my darling

daughter on her graduation, 1973.  Love,

ever, always, Mama.  Spoils.  It’s funny how

all these things meant something once, how love

gave them a soul.  And now, when the room’s

empty, after it’s all been divided or dumped, we don’t feel

relief at all, but nervousness.  We’re anxious

in this clean, well-lit, new paint place.  The past

that lived here is incinerated now, or taken

home, shelved in a cellar.  We’ve stroked over

voices with our latex blue, muffled them

without asking them to be silent, just dip

our brush into the liquid erasure and stroke,

stroke up and down, laughing at the joke

of covering over the height lines of the kids

who grew and marked, all those milestones

thrown, or worse, just brushed away

like they never ever were.