Household Meditations

1

Beyond the windowed door, the yard. Beyond that, the road and its commerce. From here inside, the house lit against the night, the window shows me myself, my small enterprise. The cherry tree holds my head in its dark arms. The road with its comings and goings, a field away, stitches its two seams in opposite directions, trading between what insists against the obvious, and what has given up against the inevitable. In just hours I will give up the day, will dim and then darken the house, turn out the last lamp, yield even my eyes to what presses so lightly against them.

2

To my left, two stacks of slim-spined books, to my right, another. Before me, a chair stacked to its full height with newspapers in a careless riffle. Two shelves of cookbooks, a box of papers. In a cabinet are bottles of nail enamel—pink, scarlet, violet—and a basket of lipsticks. Flacons of cologne. Clothing cascading from its hangers, the ghosts of my ghosts. I will be buried in the coffin the house makes for me, enameled with strokes of thin brushes, in a mist of lemon verbena, enrobed in the sheer wings of my garments, shrouded in pages.

3

My children in argument surface from below. The dog grazes my calves as he crosses under the table. A pen has gone missing. A bone buried. Irritations blooming like bulbs having wintered over. The tuneless surge of the shower two rooms away whispers like a sea in my left ear. One never does what the other asks. A dog has gone missing. The pink tulips hold their green secret. The sky has released its loose wet petals. A pink scarf the rain writes its cursive script on. The dog, found, crosses from in to out and back in again. Someone stands naked in the shower’s rain. In April, the winter is trying to become a summer. Under the rambling rose, the knot of a bone.

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