Coming to Terms

I imagine what it would be like
to fix up the old place--
let the light in:
repaint the woodwork,
prune the trees,
celebrate the farmhouse spaces.
It's hard to let go when you're
a sucker for redemption.
And it's an empty picture imagined
without the ancestral place:
a study of absences.
My bare soles know
(with a child's notice)
the nubby carpet on the stairs,
a swollen rise in the floorboards,
the dog hair tufts and fine grit--
"Put something on your feet!"
This is the homeland, the mother tongue,
the primeval link
but
you don't keep a dead body around,
not when the life lives somewhere else.