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As after a death — I haven’t moved a thing —
hemmed in by silence, lathe-and-plaster. What
is lost is not here, not elsewhere, and yet
I wander warily among these hues,
this furniture she chose, as if it were. These
blistered and water-spotted ceilings. Rows
of the white, hexagonal, porcelain bathroom tiles
buckling so slowly no foot notices,
and the kitchen linoleum — left from the 60’s — cracked
along tectonic planes. I’m safe, at least,
I tell myself. But the songs that used to wash
through my mind — melodic lines, the rewound scripts
of abjectly reverent love — are gone. And in
their place is nothing: winter ghosting among
the inkstroke outlines of oaktrees, solitude.
And then, today, the weather cleared — the fog
all finally burnt away — and so, when I stepped out,
into the disembodied air, I simply
stood on the porch, and marveled at how mournful
last year’s beach toys looked; how the mortar was crumbling
out from between each brick in the fascia; how
the dense, unkillable ivy had returned
on the north side of the house. I traced one seam
in the brickwork — powdery sandgrains clinging to
my fingertip — then drifted round, past the beds
of the dead camellias, each shrub threaded through
with a rusted snarl of wild bamboo. (I remembered
digging one hot day, pickaxing down
through the loam for hours, till I finally gave up, knelt,
and tore each rhizome out by its root, that spread
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so inextricably through the darkness there —
in the lee of the house — like the tentacles of dream.)
I didn’t even go out back, but I
could see enough of it — how masses of
wisteria had slung itself like laundry
through the trees, the delicate canopies
of dogwood and pecan laboring beneath vines
as thick as the ropes I once climbed in gym class. Here
was the whole yard crumbling away, the ground half sand,
half oystershell — which I’d flung back uphill
each April, shovelful by shovelful.
I might’ve opened the gate onto the concrete
patio we used one Sunday evening,
once, in our first spring, its state of being
almost perfectly unlooked-at, almost
perfectly complete. And next to that,
the little, rock-ringed, hyacinth-and-birdbath
island there — at the center of it all —
dissolved beneath the lineaments of weeds.
I didn’t move. I stared at the outside of
the house, where our five years of summer sand
and kisses clogged the drains, and then behind —
where what had come of my midlife was a kind
of marshy thicket, all it was evidently
meant to be. Let the major and minor keys
of the floorboards warp as they want, I thought; let the coiling
and pendant vines — tendrilous smilax and greenbriar —
link up over the shed roof; let the breaking
surf of ivy claim this thicket for
itself. I tried, I thought. I couldn’t save it.
Michael White
Wilmington, North Carolina 2003
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