House Fire
I will leave earth
with my shoes tied
as if the walk
could cut bare feet.
Robert Lowell
This Golden Summer
Really, in the end, there’s no one
to blame, although it can be
traced back to one misstep
a turn so small its almost
overlooked. That random live
ash, you know? And the conditions:
everything inside is a woodbox
with the lid nearly able to close
it’s snowing outside so he filled it
early, and the stray pine bark
on the rug seems enough in
itself laying around waiting, right?
and how it comes to this, how it all
comes to the image of dominoes
how we set them up day after day
and if we’re lucky
maybe the first couple of tracks
have dust (careful--but lift one--see)
the bald table beneath, like a rug
that under the table leg is the color
you bought it twenty years ago
and you know every time, every time!
you vacuum it fades more and more
but you don’t want to notice. One day they,
our kids, step out full grown if we’re
lucky, if that random live ash
fell in the water instead of that bulging
woodbox and that random draft
under the door, all these little
forgettings: the flue, the creosote,
the windwitch under the door, the sway
once, once! past it all, just the once
the drape she’d meant to shorten but
never got to it. Oh! Looking at it
after its all over and all we can say,
all we should say is OH! The throat
can’t console, no noise no...what good
you tell me does it do to line up the should-
haves like those dominoes and now
it’s the only game we play? Tell me--tell me
we walk through life unscathed. Really? Our feet
caked with mud and we track it, gratefully,
into the house of our living breathing
asleep kids, and the fire’s safe behind the grate
and it’s banked and soothing. Ain’t we
the lucky ones for fuck’s sake, we’re not
picking them out of the wet black
with a hoe, shit yes, say OH. Say that
and don’t say anything else.
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