Writing Spaces

I'd love this to write in!






image:  Claude Monet, Floating Studio

On Selling a Childhood House

I wonder

if the patch of four-leaf clovers

is still there, half hidden

in the grass, to bring luck

to this stranger’s house, which

after these fifty-six years

I’ve signed away?

One of the things I realize

I neglected to disclose, among

those other inadvertent omissions—

the ghosts going matter-of-factly

about their business,

a few clothespins on the line

a little pile of onionskin paper

beside the typewriter

the big Random House dictionary

open to “verve” or maybe “vervain”

while the one who looks something like me

empties a wickedly extravagant capful

of lemon verbena into a summer bath

beneath the window with the BB hole,

beguiled that June by Scarlett O’Hara’s mother.

She’ll find them just a little slow

to wash the broiler pan,

or clean the rings off the glass shelf

where perfumes congregate

and a forlorn button or two, and always

before church a clutch of irritable hair rollers

bristling over some imagined jab.

They’ll be no trouble mostly.

Only turning up the Met broadcast

on Saturdays a bit too loud,

exclaiming over smoked oysters

at cocktail time, or wandering the hall

in bathrobes, turning up or down the heat,

asking themselves uneasily,

pretending not to notice,

who she is,

who it was asked her here.

—Christie