Poetry from The Literary Review
The Inherited House
Geoffrey Brock
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These rooms breathe us. The shades of brief versions of ourselves seethe around gray lines beneath the stairs that marked our heights. Each trace left somehow unerased will spark a flash—the faint claw-marks on the door: Lady barks again. A tobacco-spit-stained corner of the porch: Ann, the maid, arches her brows, explains “blacks spit black,” and declines to share her snuff. Knobbed scars in pairs on the back-yard oak’s harrowed trunk: you and I climb pale rungs to our fort, where the shrunken world seemed for a while to yield. The fort’s gone now, the world has grown, Lady and Ann are bones, and this is ours. We own this lot. I’ve come to save what’s not been thrown away or lost, before pulling shut this warped door for good. And on the floor, behind the chambers of a browned radiator, I find this black- and-white of us (on back: “Xmas, ’68”): Jackets tight, tucked into that tie-dyed butterfly chair we liked so much, we watch snow from the porch. We’re curled together, touching like we love each other, while Iowa, behind us, whitens. That is what I’ll save. And yet who knows what love means at that age? Perhaps it’s just a stage boys go through, before rage sets in and we grow into men and have these fallings-out with sleep. Still, it’s what I must keep. |
