Washing the Woodwork

Many times I empty
the powder gray water,
renew a puddle of soap
at the base of the bowl
and run it under the tap,
watching a cap of suds
rise inches above the rim.

In places the dust piles
or sticks like a stain,
especially near the square
of latticed vent which blew
warmth up our pant legs
and ballooned our shirts
in extravagant coziness
under high, chill ceilings.
If we weren't careful,
the old wallpaper left skids
of white powder on our backs.

I work the rag over rolls and grooves,
trace simple petal lines and
the serrated crowns above door frames.
So many doorways--
three in the tiny square entry
(leaving a wall for the stained glass window),
six in the living room,
five in the kitchen--
though not all open.

It is familiar, this smell of soap and dust
and empty room, like when we moved in.
Nineteen years of life and death
and we are moving out--
like the man who lay in state in the round room,
like the woman who baked him a pie
(every day!),
like the little boy who came back old (eighty)
to see his grandparents' house
and the place they kept the cookie jar.

There are more doors here
than I can number;
memories thicker than dust,
more tender than
the hang nail on my thumb
against the rag and the water.

Last Impressions

Room where Dad died--
later remade for Mom--
blushed purple through curtains
and vacant.


Apricot kitchen
oddly the same . . .
must be the sink and
the blue and white valances.


Surrendering the flower beds:
here are the blue bells,
Dutchman's breeches,
don't mow the tulips
yet.


Boxes,
bare mattress,
brown thrasher in ash,
the sun:
a sliver
a coal
a circle--
the final good morning.

The Last Spring

 

Over fields flat and broad
as emptied rooms,
a sunburst cracks
this morning's horizon.

Dad's red tulips,
beneath the feeder,
almost bloom.

Grape hyacinths hoist
clusters of fairy-egg blue.

The forsythia blossoms
tatters of sunshine.

The sky has fallen
and is coming back up
in flowers.

Retrospective

1

Each time we drive past
a garden of gray stones,
we hush the music --
mute Sufjan Stevens
or strains of folk:
"Ain't no grave
gonna hold my body
down"--
for a moment we've borrowed
an international friend's tradition.
With us to celebrate
an American Thanksgiving,
he's patient with our questions:
What does he love about his homeland?
The food. The history of centuries
piled one atop another.
Every time someone calls 
something "old" here,
I just laugh.

2


Heavy with our feast,
we take the tonic
of air and earth,
slip under hot wires
and walk the pasture's
uneven ground
to visit a single stone
at the timber's edge
and rediscover
limestone words
in grass and brambles
under the naked trees:
Died Feb 1, 1848.
In a civilization shifty
as a snow globe,
this is old.

3

We were very favorably impressed
with the country (his sister said) and thought 
we had very good soil for cultivation 
but did not think those large prairies
would ever be so thickly settled
as they are now. *

4

Astonishingly, after one hundred and sixty-seven years,
the characters still flourish like careful marks
from an old-fashioned hand. November-numb
fingers trace grooves, follow the circular swirl
embellishing the "A" in "Aged," the leaflet
curve of a grooved numeral, the fine line leading
to a "Y."

Surely such care denotes some kind of love:
the craftsman for his craft,
the loved ones for the remembered,
even our present attention added
to the attention of those others.

5

When I die, says Nouwen,
love continues to be active . . . . **

6

In the city again, I move my things
from one apartment to another.
I survey rooms reduced
of all that made them mine,
all the small enfleshments
of an inner life. Small, empty
stretch of carpet, ceiling, neutral walls:  
my place knows me no more.

7

It is the second week of Advent.
In half-occupied new rooms,
I snuff two candles.
Smoke curls upwards
like calligraphy, smells
like my grandma's water closet,
and, oddly, like incense.

* quoted from History of McDonough County. "Reminiscence of Martitia F. Harris." Published 1878. [Martitia is my great-great-great grandmother.]

** quoted from Henri Nouwen's Finding My Way Home: Pathways to Life and the Spirit, "The Pathway of Living and Dying."

Fairy Tale

We stride in haste through cold October air
through city's dizzy mix of dark and light,
and leave the twinkled skyline for the pier
and solitude and waves beyond our sight.

Hansel and Gretel contemplate a woods
of waters; our own story has gone strange--
backdropped by dazzling towers, neighborhoods
of lives stacked row on row, and heedless range

of wheels that never sleep, however deep
the night. Above the lake, the airplanes hang
like low swung stars, like spacecraft. Skyships keep
each compass tuned by earth, huge kites on string.

Like freeways, awe and horror run parallel.
The whitecaps on the night-black lake can tell.

Jayber Crow, 2nd quote

"This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way it added to me what I had lost. I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come." 

~ Jayber Crow

Changes: Jayber Crow, first quote

Across 1/2 an acre of field from the home place, an old high school building decomposes like some ancient ruin. The school's chimney is visible on the viewer's right. This school's last graduating class included my mother. 

Quote from Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow

On Endings

The family graves looked bare without
a re-purposed tin can of peonies centered
before each stone. The old aunt
who observed the ritual is gone, and suddenly,
I miss her and my childhood certainty.

Behind sparse pines, the barnyard
clearing paints pale sky--no corn crib
cupola's silhouette, no familiar bulk
of barn. Half-guiltily, I recognize
the bewildered ache of a near one's
passing away.

I walk the field sold to the man
who tore down the barn. Technically,
I am now a trespasser. But I mean no harm,
am careful of the knee-high corn, brush
gently between young blades smooth
and whirled up top like calla lilies.

They rasp, rustle, whisper in a gentle wind.
I listen around the ringing in my ears
and hope this emptiness is the hallowing
of another sanctuary . . . that it is only
the pause between exhale and breath.

Farewelling this School Year

The peonies at the edge of my landlords' yard are unfurling. The petals are pale, with rich, dark veins along the undersides, making them look like blossoms from some master's still life. Every morning on the way to work, I view a new page in the saga of their brief and lavish display.

My internal cloud cover inexplicably lifted a bit yesterday and today. I noticed again those pieces of connection and harmony that are easily undervalued when one is caught in the throes of disillusionment. An absent student sent me, by way of a classmate, a picture he drew of Jesus. Another student typed, in the laborious hunt-and-peck style of a second grader, the most beautiful note of appreciation. My coworkers recounted moments of joy and faithfulness shared within their families.

Tomorrow we will hold one last morning together before we scatter to our summer lives. Only a handful of children will straggle in to before-school care, since most parents will already be taking the day off work in order to gather the children back up after an early dismissal. When they leave, we adults will straighten and dust shelves, wash lockers, give the floors one last good vacuuming.

This work--tied to a school year rhythm--comes with a flow of beginnings and middles and ends and new beginnings. It brings its own pacing, a threading of days with points of mercy to regroup, to remember and value good things which may have been forgotten.

Marks

In this gentlest month
(autumn of spring,
springtime of summer),
I visit the home place.
The kindness of May
touches everything:
the redbuds' fading purple,
the greening gold
of softly leafing trees,
the heat's first summer dusting
over cloud speckled miles.

Near the waterway,
soft white blossoms
lift in air near locust thorns
vicious in length.
A wren chatters. Red-wingeds
scold from short treetops.
The stream bank,with its
fold of emerald blades hides also
tongues of poison ivy.

For days after I leave again,
I walk with feet stained
by their first bare moving
over rough, beloved earth.
I carry a splinter in my thumb,
and a sense, a lily-of-the-valley
essence, of something 
 strong, sweet, and passing.

Seasonal

This April day foreshadows summer.
Our winter skins taste sun and dust
and a hint of sweat. The neighbors' lawns
smell faintly of first mowings. Tree lines
soften with tiny leaves.

Yesterday, cleaning my classroom,
I found notes secreted away by students--
some words kind, some not. I've worked here
longer than anywhere else, long enough to see,
several times, that what I thought the end
was only the middle.

Walking home from work, I pass
Mrs. D's old house, where I spent
a week and some spare evenings
when her daughter visited Egypt
or family in another state. Mrs. D
said little, but did everything with humor
and kindness--grace toward the stranger
muddling through her routine.
She's been gone a few years, but still
I glance through the big window,
missing her quiet presence. A large screen
 flickers in place of her pink chair.

A sports car vibrates in the driveway.
A small boy bounces to the beat,
buffing the car's sleek black sides.
His answering smile, as I pass,
dances in this almost summer sun.

Missing

In striving city sounds I miss
the stillness so much it hurts.
I want space for the knocking
of branch on branch,
the squeak of a hinge,
the sword whistle of wind.

Winter Cleaning

Now to heed the winter gifts:
the seed within the hooked bur shell,
the milkweed's thread of matted silk;
the barbed and needled keeping, or
the paper-smooth release.

The shearing of an ice-clear wind
demands our answer. What to hold?
What to loose?

Endings

I love this place, this corner of "forgottonia" where my family has lived for five generations. When I revisit the long gray stretches of winter fields with bins and bare trees silhouetted in the afternoon light, when night falls and I drive home with the black miles around me and distant strings of orange or yellow farmstead lights necklaced across the horizon, I feel grounded in a way that no other place duplicates. There is a steadiness and rhythm here: spring into summer into fall into winter into spring, again--with the same changes of foliage and sky. The earth changes its clothes, but it is the same earth, the same body underneath. This is a most comforting thing.

But on the human level, there is profound change and decay. My brother and I paused on our walk today (a short one, due to a bitter wind) to examine an old sign post just down from my mother's house. It stands sturdily, but embraced by a young tree's branches. Grass has totally overtaken the corner the signs once marked. Not long before my parents moved our family back to this area, authorities closed the train crossing which gave the corner purpose, choosing to maintain only two ways across the tracks that split the village in half. A good move, and one I appreciate, as it hugely diminished traffic past the house that would become our home. But in the years after the move, we watched that bit of abandoned road turn to grass and disappear before our eyes.

We also watched a house just down the road move from habitation to collapse. Soon after moving to the area, my sister and I met a blond boy with a dog named Oreo who lived in that house. After a while the boy and his family moved away. Eventually the front porch door hung open over sturdy red steps. We could see holes under the eaves. Now nothing remains but a pile of rubble topped, last I noticed, with a bit of the peak of the roof. Around here, you can watch a house and road disappear bit by bit, year by year, right in front of your eyes.

From the kitchen window, I look across the field to a ruin of bricks around one tall, definitive chimney--my grandfather and my mother's old high school. Swifts live in the chimney, flying from it to grace periwinkle evenings with their twittering songs and little paddling wings. From Mom's front porch--the part of the house facing the village rather than the fields, I see the shell of my grandparents' church, looming above the neighbor's little house. In earliest memories of visits to my grandparents', I vaguely recall a dim, high-ceilinged interior with big wooden chairs on a dais. My mother remembers that a cat once wandered in during a service and sat in the wooden chair reserved for the pastor. He, being a cat-lover, simply chose the chair beside it and let the cat enjoy its seat.

I don't know where I'm going with this post. Perhaps it is the melancholy of knowing my visit to western Illinois draws to a close--but I feel this evidence in front of my eyes (I've grown up with this evidence) that the lives we build and the things we build don't necessarily last. The seasons with their beauty and trouble will roll around again, but maybe not for us, maybe not for us in this place . . .

School Concert

Row upon row,
the children fill the whole
church front and spill
into the choir loft.
Christmas red--
of sweaters and sparkly dresses,
of bow ties, of headbands
catching thick black curles
and white-blond wisps--
shifts like a tree full
of monarch bossom.
Each time the children rise,
the air thrums with the stirring
of two hundred tiny wings.
A song's motions raise
a zephyr through the branches;
bouncing, jubilant, through
kindergarten, first, second,
and third grades (a tossing of hands,
a swaying of bodies); then tapering
through the taller ones within the loft,
whose careful voices crack,
whose anxious ears catch
whispers, even now,
of some long call
up the wind.

Discoveries

At Grandpa's farm, I discovered much:
an abandoned room of bottles that I mustn't touch,
a play house complete with wire wreath,
the delicious sense of being a secret in the grasses,
the courage to climb a shiny, silver bin--
but best was the nest of kittens in the barn,
soft ears folded over tiny, hard heads--
perfect translucent claws clutching
air as revealed in the dim loft-light,
hues and patterns noted, then cradled,
softly, under my chin.

Once I thought I found a way to grow time:
rise early, and precious days expand,
grow long past expectation. Each morning
I'd step through darkness to the kitchen's light
radio murmur of hog/corn/bean prices,
and find my grandpa, always in his chair,
cutting toast squares for cats.
The ritual feeding: from back porch, to barn,
to machine shed, to silo and grinding shed;
the herd of cats; the happy dogs;
the eager, round-eyed cattle--Grandpa
led in his great rubber boots. He seemed
rather like the knobby-knuckled, wry
or silently laughing farm's soul.
With him my day began and expanded
through dust and mystery.

With age comes knowledge,
with even two or three new years.
When the kitchen, too, was silent--
my grandpa, old and in need of more sleep--
I stepped outside, somehow bereft,
walked alone to the silo, watched
color seep up the edge of a navy sky.

You never get more time--
only the hint of a coming sun,
the rose and turquoise rim
around the turning earth.

Confession

Before clipping,
white tips measure,
bluntly, the time since
fingers last touched strings.
Each bright click marks
a sin of omission confessed,
a repentance.

I lift my violin -- tiger nut
from black hull-case --
and feel, between shoulder
and neck, the forgotten vibrations
of life renewed.

Alternatives

See, this is how it is:

you can stand at the tip of the board,
your little, bare toes curled at the edge
as it bends, obligingly, toward the water,
and all you see is the blue, squiggled shimmer
of water that will swallow you up
after you
                f
                 a
                     l l
                         to your death. OR

you can quitthinkingand JUMP

--

feel
the timeless split-second of air

and the close of water over your head,

the splat then low, long blurble in your ear drums
as the chlorine stings against your nostrils and your
stretchy suit pulls against your thighs.

Then
your pale feet flutter in the depths,
and your arms pull, frantically, for the white fired sun,
and
up you come with your hair in your eyes and in your mouth--

ever so much more alive than before
you jumped.

After Eucatastrophe

My hands are suddenly full of rainbows,
so full they begin to spill over, so
I fold up the bottom of my long shirt
like a little girl, and pour the rainbows
into the pocket and carry them close.

What do you do with a shirt full of rainbows?
Share them, surely . . . but the world
is so loud and I have learned to be alone.
Do you know what makes rainbows?
Storms and sun, oil slicks and garden hoses.

In the sky just now, a rainbow!
Pale-bright behind silver drops
beyond my yellow lamp.
A secret too good to keep, this rainbow!
This audacious trick of the light.

My hair dripping rainbows, my eyes leaking rainbows,
rainbow pieces running down my arms,
I survey the muddy world.
The ark is rough against my back.
I wonder where to begin.

Stir of Seasons

We carry, each within us,
the bones of all our winters.
We know the stretch of branches
bereft, the lines burnt after
cascades of red and golden flames.
We recognize the powder
blue silence and the ash gray bark--

and carry them wrapped round and round,
cocooning marrow. Deep within,
that God-breathed ember licks the life
into our veins and wings a charm
of summers, evening watch of springs.

See winter bones sprout blossoms,
and burst and bud and spin down
pink maple helicopter wings!
Unclose your brushtip lashes--lift
The newborn eyes of your old soul.