ALAN SHAPIRO
Now and again, I look up as I clean,
and the large room we quarreled over,
arranging and rearranging it all week,
surprises me this morning, stiller somehow
for the tangled shadowy commotion light
is making on the freshly painted walls
and varnished floors, around you working there
bent over at the table. Slowly you run
the hem of what will be our bedroom curtains
under the needle pumping faster now,
now slower, blurring and coming into view.
I think my things begin to seem less shy
here next to yours: our couches at an angle,
quilted with shadows which the sunlight weaves
and unweaves all day long, day after day;
your oak chest in between them, and on the chest
a lamp and small blue vase my ex-wife left
behind so many months ago. Blue vase,
and lamp, and couch, the table where you sew—
suddenly for the first time they remind me
not so insistently of my old place,
the other rooms in which I once arranged them
as carefully as we have now, as though for good.
Suddenly for the first time I can imagine
being years from my last thought of her,
that past life, old intimacies, the small talk—
tender or quarrelsome—our days and nights
unfolded in those rooms only, nowhere else.
Even if months from now some small detail
should come to mind, hearing myself say something
she would say, her voice entangled with
my voice a moment, I know now it will come
only to prove how easily I had
forgotten it till then, how easily
it is relinquished. I dust the blue vase off.
I buff it to a stringent sheen.
How odd that I should have to tell myself,
today, I was at home there all those years,
woven into that intricate design
so deeply, sadly, certain it was durable
if only because it seemed to fray so long.
And though a long time after I would struggle
to believe it was my leaving, not living there,
that made those rooms seem magical, today
it’s the belief itself that saddens me:
it comes so easily. What saddens me today
is that I’m home.
You call me over.
You’re smiling because the curtains in your hands—
white curtains with blue flowers and yellow flowers—
fall everywhere about you, fold on fold,
as you try to hold them up. And I smile too,
taking the other edge, surprised how much
I have to lean back, one knee bent, to keep
that plentiful bright cloth above the floor
it grazes now, no matter what I do.