The rain was rough
The ice was worse
The hundred-and-fifty-
Year-old slate tiles
Have started giving me
The side-eye
I’m new to this, home ownership
I wash the wood floors
And make beds with fresh sheets
I walk down the street
Passing, like a stranger, by
Though secretly I know
This is my house, my dirt
Where the grapes are beginning to stir
With their ideas of the future
The way a poem stirs
In an alphabet,
Where already desire and nostalgia
Are starting to spin
Tight webs about the books and sleds
That belong in my kids’ toy chests
So that one day when someone asks
What do you remember of your childhood home?
Gently they will smile, thinking
Of the place where their mother
Screamed at them
To pick up their shit
how did this poem begin for you?
I wrote this poem toward the end of March, after a season of harsh frosts and downpours; the first lines had their origin in a mundane anxiety about a couple of roof slates. At some point, I was surprised to see that I was no longer talking about the house or, rather, that the house had become an object through which I was contemplating time. Even though I’ve never actually watched Citizen Kane, I’ve seen enough clips and spoofs of Orson Welles gasping out “Rosebud” to understand that the word refers to a sled from boyhood. It’s a sort of secret password conjuring up the character’s lost home, his mother and her care, and he’s been holding on to it his whole life, even when no one around him could understand it. So, when those sleds appeared, they set up the poem’s final movement: where the kids who now live in this house, later asked to recall their childhood, remember the mother who held it all together, at a moment when she is no longer in the world and they are maybe the last alive to have really known her.