MEMORY

What We Hear

As he reads I want to know more  

about him so I imagine a home,

a history, while waiting for the final

words of a long poem that reminds me

of long ago Christmas oranges

in the toe of a stocking. He reaches in,

into the past without looking.

It's as if it were my own story

and he may not recognize himself.

That's my mother bathing me 

as I stand in the wash tub in front of 

the green enamel, chrome trimmed stove. 

I grimace, then giggle, as rinse water 

pours over my head, down  my body. 

She brushes wet hair from my face.

The Homestead

At the auction we withheld a dusty 

framed photograph of The Homestead as it was 

in nineteen thirty. In the picture's lower 

foreground flakes of foam float on waves of grass,

blurry images of Queen Anne's Lace in bloom.

The buildings, burned, in eighteen sixty and

rebuilt, had been repaired, expanded, revised, 

modernized. Dormer windows budded from roofs.

Ell and shed became dining room and kitchen.

In the barn the hayloft became a dance hall.

The picture was taken from this un-mown meadow where, 

age four, I would have played and where, ten years

after the auction, I kneel, age sixty-three, to

photograph where The Homestead had been. Queen Anne's

Lace flowers lie like giant snowflakes in the grass.