I have returned to the refrigerator of my youth,
the one that droops
its shoulders. A small thing,
just noticed, humming in the corner
of my mind. It wears its white lab coat
and shuts at the end of each meal
with a definitive snap, unlike the casual
sighings of the new ones. The old one remembers
the ice pick, the tongs,
it knows its mortality, its vulnerability
to the electrical cord.
It has nothing in its door but door.
It lives in the place rooted in dream
that will not change.
I have returned to my brother after a long time,
because of the refrigerator
that held his medicines, his juice, on wire racks.
I have not told my chiropractor
why my spine is rigid with history,
It is rigid with my brother’s spine,
seizing, arms thrown forward, trembling.
My spine knows not when or where
this might occur
again. It is an animal exposed,
a fish eaten down to its Christmas tree.
It is 1955 at my grandmother’s
nervous house, with the bubble lights
and the refrigerator in the pantry
and the men’s bourbon there,
and my brother hushed up so no one will
worry. History has hold of the situation
and will not alter a bit of it; I see myself
from myself by the gulf of regret,
the refrigerator keeping its small light
to spill into the darkness
at intervals.