Virginia Richards, Jumel Mansion, ca. 1936.
RECESS
Flattened stone floor, covered
in wooden slats, the portico
with columns and even arches,
not exactly the porch
the other house (our same floor
plan doubled into something else)
had across our common grass.
Theirs raised above ground where
girls sit outside-inside or inside-outside,
when their window, used as a door, is left open.
All you can see is an opaque double window
with legs, feet, and standing below.
A hill behind. Often, an older couple walks,
just a little lower. You can tell by the sound.
Where the lawn tilts seems to pause.
They unclip the leashes of their two huskies.
Wind sounds against
what it clings to, clinging back.
Disappearing beneath the hill
transmitting a noise that was nothing insignificant,
the couple walks every day, their huskies, and gradually.
House open, close. Some houses open
from common room to Common’s Lawn.
A purely linear approach, walking
from one house to another.
Followed when not to be, you asked.
Walking the same way over,
stepping back into marks,
to outside your house from another inside.
To the house with its porch and its swing,
allowed to return and never do you are told
you are and never do.
Still you sit. Will you, it was of me asked,
under a canopy, under the hill, the small stone thrown to me
rested on the porch canopy.
Under the hill, I was just a little lower than visible.
PORTENT
They can’t keep to themselves.
Two stacked squares of photos
inadvertently make a star.
Filled with my father,
one contains
his pictured eye
I poked through.
Our family squared
around a table.
A plate almost
empty but for a speck.
Fluorescent bulbs, uncovered.
Covered my hand in someone’s
hand under the table. Beige slivers
of bread. This has happened
before; my hand playing
in someone. Punctured hole
in print where I tried.
These stars can all be undone.
I’m eluding the darkest room
in search of a thing.
In the tilted way he reached
across to give away his hand, not
knowing he would never get it back,
he built the post he bound himself to
and can never leave.
