Cleaning Her Room

Place of dust, cavity of canceled air,
room I clean and strip, tossing
the candy box once too frilled to toss,
the satin dress with matching shoes,
their suede split and curling, the birthday cards,
some forty years old. And what to do
with letters tied in a yellowed bow from a son
long dead, his poster-size photo on the wall?
And the books? From one spills a weekly salary stub:
September 19, 1961, $31.07. From another, a photo
of a svelte woman in a crisp white uniform, her hair
still flaming red. Here’s her credit union book,
five dollars deposited each week, forty dollars
withdrawn each December. Here’s the dime store
candy dish I gave her. My grade school report cards—
all objects in which her memories lived.
I cling to impalpable ones: her feisty two-step                               
when she crossed a street, the self-recognizing bray
when she’s caught cheating at cards, how drunk
she was on one small glass of wine.
 

Cain in Nod

I began again in the land of Nod,
east of Eden, and I built a city in that region
where everything is surface: the streets echoed
only with a stranger’s footfalls. They rang only
with a neighbor’s courteous civility.
 
I took a wife whose strange beauty had beneath it
no homeliness. She sang my son lullabies
I’d never heard, melodies so tender
I’m sorry I can’t remember them.
I’m sorry I can’t remember the songs of my mother.
 
I watch from the moonlit roof
as a star rips a hole in the sky, and then's banished.
To the west beyond the houses, the land
rolls away toward Eden, toward the valleys
mapped by a thousand games of summer,
 
toward the valleys blocked by swords
of infamy, marked by my countenance
fallen into the earth, fallen in to Nod.
Heat lightning purples the calm
of the small hills, and I turn away,
 
crossing the roof to watch
the sleeping city. Here and there
a whitewashed wall rises, disembodied
from the shadows, and the dark lays its hand
at the nape of my neck, cordial as a brother.

© Copyright, 2012, Jacquelyn Malone.
All rights reserved.