The Inherited House - Poem

Literary Review, Wntr, 2004 by Geoffrey Brock

   These rooms breathe us. The shades of brief
   versions of ourselves seethe
   around gray lines beneath the stairs

   that marked our heights. Each trace
   left somehow unerased will spark
   a flash--the faint claw-marks

   on the door: Lady barks again.
   A tobacco-spit-stained
   corner of the porch: Ann, the maid,

   arches her brows, explains
   "blacks spit black," and declines to share
   her snuff. Knobbed scars in pairs

   on the back-yard oak's harrowed trunk:
   you and I climb pale rungs
   to our fort, where the shrunken world

   seemed for a while to yield.
   The fort's gone now, the world has grown,
   Lady and Ann are bones,

   and this is ours. We own this lot.
   I've come to save what's not
   been thrown away or lost, before

   pulling shut this warped door
   for good. And on the floor, behind
   the chambers of a browned

   radiator, I find this black-and-white
   of us (on back:
   "Xmas, '68"): Jackets tight,

   tucked into that tie-dyed
   butterfly chair we liked so much,
   we watch snow from the porch.

   We're curled together, touching like
   we love each other, while
   Iowa, behind us, whitens. That

   is what I'll save. And yet
   who knows what love means at that age?
   Perhaps it's just a stage

   boys go through, before rage sets in
   and we grow into men
   and have these fallings-out with sleep.

   Still, it's what I must keep.

Geoffrey Brock's poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Hudson Review, and elsewhere. His volume of Cesare Pavese translations received the PEN USA Translation Award and the Lois Roth Translation Award. He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford.