It’s Settled Then.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air---
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
Robert Lowell
Skunk Hour
But only on the rim where the dust butts
up against the edge of the doily whose thin blue
border was crocheted in the early evening
hours by my grandmother. Now, her dust, or ashes,
have been laid--to rest? who can know--only of
what all’s been sifted of her and poured
into a pink (pretty I have to say, she’d’ve
liked it) box. I have no aversion to dust
only that it’s always an always, a con-
stant falling thing we breathe, that we
settle on, that settles on us. It’s all our days
and our ways of getting there. I have some
of my friend Roger’s library and I know when I open
one of the chosen he’s there and all the people
who walked through his small cabin on their way
to the bathroom after their obligation of two
or three Seagram’s right? What he used
to drink? With what? club soda? But. Next
year he’ll have been gone ten years. His
ashes scattered, some in a little paper boat
I made with a poem he wrote years ago about
a boy and girl being turned loose from the furnace,
from “the distance from the tiny/hateful
meagerness of our origins” and he floated
finally, on the water, with one button in his bone
and ash. Oh if I’d’ve known it was appropriate
I would’ve plucked that button up and taken it
home with me even though it never could open
or close anything ever again. Maybe though it would
justify the lazy way I let all this dust settle
around me and wait sometimes months
before I take it all up into a cloth to wash
to send finally out of the house. Mostly I’m
content to let it rest, my own little burial ground,
like my grandmother’s handiwork draped over
dressers and nightstands--to wake up next to it
to sleep next to it--to breathe where they have
breathed and maybe this is all the closure (at
the moment anyhow) I need.
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