I cut my mother’s curtains off the rods
with the same dressmaker’s shears she had used
to slice the fabric from the bolt thirty
years before. Her steady zizz of steel through
cloth had once filled our closets with garments
of her making, had once dressed our windows
with lined linen panels and modest sheers.
My father’s installation of the rods
was a gibbet meant to hold. I couldn’t
tear them down so I climbed the ladder, cut
loose the drapes and watched them shudder and drop.
My parents were like this: fashioned
to endure, stubborn as an old post.