One Room
A poem
In every house we lived in growing up
my mother created an order in each room
like a designer,
rugs anchored seating,
end tables in reach of any outstretched arm,
heirlooms complemented upholstered armchairs,
like Great’s deep cherry piano against a wall,
out of tune since at least 1990
but elegant, as if a pianist lived with us
We looked wealthier than we were to visitors
and yet in my mother’s bedroom there were piles
of clean, folded clothes,
of gifts for the next Christmas or birthday;
no matter how immaculate the other rooms,
the master was always sullied with unkempt
items to be put away
Thirty years later, the piles have crept outward;
there are no limits to the stacks of things —
my mother says the floods that ruined her floors
are the reason;
perhaps so.
Strange that my dad’s final favorite home is the same way:
he keeps pristine the rooms he shared with my grandfather;
rocking chairs circle a coffee table of McMurtry, Flannery O’Connor,
John Graves and anything Irish,
Oxford English Dictionaries are close by,
but just the same
his bedroom is the landing place
of every haphazard page, every dust mite
the cords of expired electronics
and old case files trapping in time
these late days in his long career
They have been divorced for almost thirty years,
between them they have moved at least as many times;
they each have storage spaces full of our past selves,
his roll-top desk, my fourth grade bunk bed, numerous broken lamps,
twice as many books as most people read;
Each Sunday it seems
I itch to clean out more space
in this, my simple two-room apartment,
to make it more sparse and empty;
I crouch and squeeze between spaces for anything I can donate
and make someone else’s,
to air out this shrinking space
of whatever isn’t necessary or sentimental.
They are not consumerists,
but they have lived,
and there is a difference between people, I think,
who have come to the eighth decade of life
and been forced to prepare for it all to end
on an approaching date,
and people who don’t know how to part with anything else
than what has already been taken
