The smell for one thing.
Open the door and the odor
of mold hits you square
in the face. Say you
forgot something. Find sanctuary
in your car, your oh-so-clean
car, even the lingering smell
of McDonald’s lunch a relief.
(It was a long drive
to Dad’s. Only one reason
you rarely made it, traveling along
I-90 through LaCrosse, a glimpse
of the Mississippi and glacial-less
bluffs beautiful, too brief.)
The smell is the basement’s
annual spring flooding,
destroyed drywall downstairs. Descend
the wooden stairway
of the rectangle ranch
you grew up in. The extent! Weird
enough what he had saved. A baby
carriage, Lite Brite,
one of a pair of Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots,
school papers and child art, wilted with wet,
stacks of books, pages dried together
like shipwreck survivors
clinging to one another,
a Mexican tooled-leather purse, an old one-eyed bear, your hope
chest. All eroded
by the creeped-in water, not just
this year, but years. Saved
yet not salvaged.
Bugs, but you see those. Sills pilled
with Japanese beetles that look
like harmless ladybugs, but have their own
particular stench if you touch. Daddy
longlegs weaved homes into corners,
fly corpses suspended. The black
and red armor of boxelder bugs
in every corner.
Rodents too. Holes chewed
into walls. Insulation seeps out
like dirty cotton candy. If you are brave
enough to look for a water glass, you will see evidence.
Of mice creeping in and out of cupboards,
over mismatched dishes, Tupperware,
weaving amid yellowing boxes of
Morton’s salt, Hamburger Helper,
and amber bottles of pills
long since emptied.
Also you see your vain
efforts to help. Not enough
in the end, or maybe since
the beginning. You hand-wrote recipes
and taped them to those cabinet doors,
yellow now with age.
A soft blanket
you gifted at Christmas, crusted
with spilled food and obscured by
shed dog hair, spread
over a sofa. The nice television is still nice, but
the pale blue recliner you bought with your brother
has gone limp with overuse. Strangely
you are reassured
that the casket you both chose
is quite lovely, pale blue satin to match
his eyes, though his eyes,
you both agreed,
were donated fast.
(There was nothing
you could do. There was everything
you could have done. But anger, well,
its seeps and rots too.)
Here there is no resurrection
long in coming. Roll the stone
away, and there is only a failed shrine
to keep your mother’s memory alive, what she left
before
she died. He shut his eyes
to decay in favor of dreams of days
when her collection
of tea cups, washed to gleaming,
posed on the polished table, debutantes awaiting
the Ladies’ Aid. Maybe he remembers
how he would cross the kitchen
in farm boots of hard leather, and steal
one more cookie, maybe the same kind
his mother had made
him when he was a young boy
coming in
from the fields.
(You will never know.
You will never stop knowing.)
Rough Drafts Only 