The World Ended Early at My Family Homestead
My small, small concerns
will be papered over, just as skin
attends to a wound not even a marriage
could fix. I should have paid attention
to the tissue and gum that weds
bone to muscle, or the sensation
blond laminate left on my feet
when I was little. I should have
memorized the distance from my
bedroom to my parents’, so I could
relive it in any dark circumstance.
The built-ins and their paperbacks,
the king-size mattress where we
watched ephemeral disasters
unfolding beside us, in the mirror;
where we listened to rain on white pebbles,
or on our scalps in the bath; where we thought
nothing of its hollow impact on tarpaper
and rafters, the winds caressing shadows
on stucco corners, or splitting bark as if peeling
away the raw from the embarrassment.
I meant to spare this. I meant to save
you at your ripest, but now these hesitations
will be scars, because I refused a clean
severance. A scar without a story is merely
a blemish, an error, as when a family
invests its courage to defeat its plainness.
Sound and evidence no longer relevant,
our place much like an earthquake, or
divorce, or any fugitive incident drowned out
by the present clamor. I came, I saw, and it
did not matter; the copper stopped breathing
and green rust replaced it. I hoped all this
repetition and nonsense would have worn
a groove by now in the universal fabric;
into the membranes that stake out the layers
of space from those without radio contact.
Our astronauts had to penetrate them if they
were to become heroes; confront the natural tactics
with everything they had, while I cannot even see
the second hand rounding out the last of each moment
though I’m not done pretending it hasn’t happened yet.
