Cleaning Up: Bedroom

Cleaning Up: Bedroom

            I, who used to be inconsolable (and the world

wild around me)

            can stand here now.

                                                “History”

                                                Jorie Grahm

(you are the brass bobeche at rest

before everything above you is lit

and then when you descend, you let it all

go like any well balanced

candle, without a fuss or a mess)

It’s been twelve years.  No, thirty.  No forty five or six.

It started here.  No, it just ended here.  It began

            before she arrived but she brought some

            of it with her and she became we at one point.  Was it when:

there was no working phone in this place?

the baby was bit in the face

            by the dog and oh…my soul...

my soul was it when my brothers, one who:

lives a year through 

the war only to be killed

                        three weeks on leave at home.  And my other,

                                    brother too, three months after him.  It’s this, those two

car wrecks in the bloody sheets there’s a pack

of smokes under her pillow there’s that drone

of the oxygen machine there’s three pictures of three daughters

            and their arch-bishop oh this is hard this is the hardest

of all: the intimacy of a bedroom is what crushes the shy

yet at some point it all has to

arrive here and has to be swept up or washed

or scrubbed and dumped and what all can’t be managed

beneath these things will either lie down

in the grass like that new fawn or it will

be sliced clean through  with the clam hoe

or be shot straight up shot in the head

or

and this steals her when she swishes the hot water

in the bucket:

ü  someone’s coming

            home

ü  someone’s asking questions

            tomorrow

ü  someone’s sleeping off this poor woman’s dope

and sold the rest

She says:           I’m done here.  I’m done.

She says:           I’ll take these old quilts and housedresses and smokes home.

She says:           I’ll burn what I can’t cut.

She says:           It’s all in her chart, the ER checklist:

                                    overdose

                                    assault

                                    seizure

                                    suicide attempt

Brother, she says, you died first.  It was yesterday.  It was thirty years ago.  It was, second brother, this whole house under the roof of that prom car and you and two other kids died.  It was the first draft of anything—and standing back to see it all gleam see it brand new see it all and then toss the lit match over your shoulder as you turn to walk off when it’s all cleaned away or if there’s that other sort of bravery or resolve or just bone weariness after a night like tonight there’s no turning at all, it’s just a toss, just a watchful eye as the first thing the match lands on decides to lean in to the small flame and catch and pass it on.  The luck of it.  Pass it on and let 'er go.