For some of the departing guests
it took only a line or two
to express their thanks and add some flattery,
using the handy ballpoint pen on the hall table.
Others needed a whole page
to detail the many agreeable aspects
of the place—the comfy bed, the spice rack,
the traffic of birds around the feeder.
And sometimes a child had left
near the bottom of a page
a drawing of a sailboat or a pine tree
for this was a cottage in the woods by a lake.
The content was pretty much the same
for all agreed the place was exceedingly lovely;
indeed, as I turned the pages,
it seemed the cottage and the woods and lake
had been growing more and more lovely
with every passing summer
as if everyone, like me, read the whole book
and now was resolved to outdo the previous entries,
piling up one superlative after another
to create a state of such perfection
that the comments might have been left
by Adam or Eve before they fled paradise
through what was then the world’s only gate.
For surely, our first parents
enjoyed their all-too-brief stay
as much as the Larsen family had enjoyed theirs.
Like the Ryans on their honeymoon,
they must have appreciated the scenery.
And like the Talbots, the Halvorsons from Wisconsin,
and the Blancos from Philadelphia,
they too couldn’t wait to come back another time.
Of course, there would be no coming back
because of the talking snake coiled around a fruit tree
and the flood of human shame that followed.
And leave it to the guest book
to contain another fall from grace
experienced just last summer
by one of the Stokes family from Jackson Heights,
young Emily, who wrote in her best penmanship
“Sorry about your little blue vase.
I was just trying to put some flowers in.”
And then, with a bag packed at my side,
it was my turn with the ballpoint pen,
but all I could think about
were the shards of the blue vase
scattered on the tiles of the kitchen floor
as well as the pool of water spilled there
and the various wildflowers still in her hand.