Stairs

Stairs

I was trying to remember what birds did

before there were telephone wires.

                                    Marilynne Robinson

                                    Gilead

Turns out I’d taken down the wrong thought

all along. It was too small and spine broke,

like the water pump in the pantry of an old

house I grew to love when I was young.  I knew

it long after its majesty had passed and forgave it

her staircase, heavy and only all on her own

and forbidden to be climbed on.  I’d wait

at the bottom for friends who gambled and listen

to the sigh of their creeping, the shine

of their defiance a sweat I saw as spotted moth eggs

on their upper lip and how they grinned

when they made it back with nothing

but their own daring.

Later I’d see that staircase as a Miss Haversham,

when I was in high school and knew

who she finally was.  I would hide beside

the broken tub and toilet and wait for the boys

my sister knew to leave me alone (I’d only come

to write and be alone) to go

into the mildew all on their own.  It was enough

she’d led them there with me as lookout,

enough she was never

afraid of those stairs, enough for me while she,

while they went away, to frame the sea with the glass-

less window and see it all outside of me, a trick

of the light.  I had come to be good at that

departure.  Still, I’d hear them laughing

and imagine their lips.  I’d hear their sneakered

feet sweeping debris and while they thumped

the plaster dust puffed down through the ceiling

laths and fell all around the hip of the broke

in two toilet bowl, whose tank was in

another room though I could never guess why.

I loved the house, especially in late winter

when was too cold for her and her boys,

when it spilled my sister into cars.  I never

wrote about how, until now, thirty plus years,

on paper I would want to daub with light as honest

as Catholic windows at Saturday afternoon

mass, that west facing cathedral end cupping

the thorn-crowned bleeding heart of Jesus,

the broadest pane of all.  It throbbed

in my open notebook, fraudulent, a cock-tease.

The day she left me there alone I stood

afterwards at the bottom

of those stairs and pulled myself together.  After

he'd opened me up like lemon pie and gave

a slice to each finger, after he said relax, relax,

lay still you’ll like it I promise, I thought

but Jesus those stairs, I wish I’d learned to dare

to climb those stairs.