In This Old Colonial

 

In This Old Colonial

The darkness was thin, 

like some sleazy

dress that has been

worn and worn 

for many winters and always

lets the cold through 

the bones.

                        Eudora Welty

                        "The Whistle"

I'm wondering coming round from

the back to face the front

door, if the parlor was to the left

or to the right?  Being courteous, attending

to the grief the living participate

in, if I were to arrive at this 

house two hundred years ago in some

honor of the dead, which direction

would I take to sit with the laid out

remains and disappeared stains buffed 

from the quarter-sawn pine, fire

on the inside of the andirons to drive all

our breath/wind up the brick in 

shocked or resolved shuffs, 

depending on the unnatural or 

or natural they may have gone

down, and then gone up, some

part of them stuck in the deep gleam

of the creosote, tinking like

clinked glasses, to come loose

in the next heavy rain and some

staying, when the brick goes cold, 

for the once favored, for the way it gave

to heat?  Maybe, this isn't the time

to ask, but can you remember reading Eudora

Welty's "the Whistle", when such a dying

freeze is so near their  ( I want a word

for the skin, the way it dimples when

the ripe's on, the way it stays

thick as thieves all summer and then gives

way to the least of freezes)  

tomatoes, the dearest

thing they can bring to heat is

their cherished heirloom? And once lost,

the crop is nothing but limp along

the macadam path

of hindsight---all is lost come the

icy dust of morning.  If I'm re-

membering correctly, they 

freeze to death, yes?  And aren't 

their memories given back to them

with the ferocity of that heirloom

on fire and don't they become

fiends for the least streak of soot

and warmth?  And too, these 

immediate to me ghosts?  Don't

they too go up the chimney 

where some part of them stays

stuck, like their last supper, 

tucked to the flue and brick?

Two hundred years of it, what

the sweep, with his bricks

and sticks, misses?