Tableau


For beauty not for heat we built
fires all winter the small square
of our hearth an altar or a theater
but what were we witnessing
beguiled by the smell and sound

the walls of the living room
billowing around our gold
and shadowed figures image
of a family from another age
the firelight itself unfixed

in time unfixed in place
general as the dark and cold
as hunger and danger though
we were warm and safe
furnace humming radiators hot

to the touch our kitchen stocked
mere steps from where we sat
talking or reading or listening to music
and sometimes the phone rang
or the cats cried to go out

we rarely sat in silence but
imagining it now the only sound
is the bright pulse of the fire
not the pop and hiss of burning just
the airy errant thrumming of the flames

---

Threshold


When the house was first ours
before it smelled of paint and wax
before we'd laid down rugs
or cooked a single meal
in its small outmoded kitchen

it had the stony scent
of shade under a garden shed
the damp unsettled smell
of quiet and disuse
though it hadn't stood empty

we'd open the back door
and there it was
intractable as loneliness
or the memory of loneliness
as if someone else's loss

were lodged within our gain
and it seemed important
it seems important now
that before we moved in
the house smelled stony

and shadowed even in the light
of a mild November
as we crossed the threshold
ten twelve twenty times with tools
and tiles and cleaning supplies

each bright room blank
the walls and windows bare
steps uncarpeted floorboards scarred
but how sure I felt how safe
as if the history of this place

had always been leading
to the home we'd make
the home we were making
that weirdly balmy fall
when a life seemed long

---

Echo


All the years we spent
expecting years to come
no thought of last things
each spring another spring
new grass at our feet

it was April it was May
we sat out back at sunset
spread a map across our knees
to plot a summer route
but I was never good at that

I struggled to make sense
of distances and altitudes
the skewed concentric circles
where mountains must be
I had to squint to picture

the valleys and our figures
stepping stone by stone
across each ink-blue line
the map itself a paper world
complete with its own key

while the real world's mysteries
kept unfolding
how tender and deliberate
and hopeful we were then
how tireless and baffled

climbing months like switchbacks
you and I with the children
behind and then beside us
and now so far ahead
shouting at a rock face

to hear their ghosts shout back
the voices theirs
or almost theirs
and then unrecognizable
except as falling human sounds

---

February Morning


I was standing in the bedroom
looking out at our neighborhood
winter sky striped pink and blue
the lawn the street the houses
just beginning to glow

an ordinary morning
like ten thousand other mornings
I'd viewed from this window
still its beauty startled me
and I felt sad to think

how little beauty matters
when suffering is commonplace
and vanishing unstoppable
it was as if I could see our life
from far above

or maybe from the future
the hour already gone
the day gone the room gone
and the scene itself a bright scrap
flaring in your hand