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To My Husband’s Grandparents, Who Built This House
In the months after your funerals we moved our boxes and furniture in
between your decades of belongings, maneuvering around
what you’ve left behind:
a drawer full of neckties, a cellar full of Mason jars.
When I clean the house I find your fingerprints around the light switch
in the bedroom, in the dust on the windowsills, on the yellow rotary phone,
a few silver hairs on a worn felt hat.
Dull trails are worn into the carpet—
from the bedroom to the bathroom, from the couch to the kitchen—
and footprints are pressed in the workshed sawdust,
where unfinished projects sit on the table,
the worn handle of the lathe motionless in the dust.
In the yard the grapefruits rot on your tree,
Christmas decorations twinkle in the attic
next to boxes of carefully saved wrapping paper.
The linen closet is full of musty sheets and hand-embroidered pillowcases,
old electric blankets I’m afraid to plug in,
a cracked hot water bottle, a stiff mop, and light bulbs stored in shoeboxes.
Your Danish furniture has been sitting in the guest room
since my husband was a little blonde boy,
the same sagging twin mattress where he slept on summer visits.
He shows me a photo of himself, in diapers on the same linoleum kitchen floor
where he stands now,
The pattern has been worn away in patches
in front of the sink and stove.
When dinner is ready I put my hands inside your oven mitts,
setting the pan to cool on chipped counter tiles.
Our cats jump up on the mantel and shatter your pair of ceramic quail.
Family members come by with boxes
to fill and take away, emptying the closets,
leaving dusty outlines of frames on the walls.
At night I lie in your bed next to my sleeping husband,
breathing your bedroom’s air,
watching light filtered through your lace curtains
shift its pattern on the ceiling above our heads.
Return to Volume 2.2
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