Читать книгу Run the Red Lights - Ed Skoog - Страница 12

The Empty House

Only children have homes; and an adult who feels at home in the world is out of touch with reality. Growing up means needing a map. Children shouldn’t feel lost; adults should feel lost because that is what they are.

Adam Phillips, On Balance

Help me remember which house was mine,

or name. Which way to live in hazard.

Ours held work, applesauce, and milk,

cabinets never closed, like movie crypts,

and the sink a bay of sunken ships.

But in the empty house next door

an obstinate order obtained in gray,

glimpsed rooms without sweat

and sex and no sex and sleep,

toilet unfreckled by use, porcelain

curves like the neck of a marble nude.

Sprinklers met their times, some

lights inside on timers mocked schedule.

No maggots wiggled in their trash cans,

although they had a couple in the alley,

side by side, wired into place, fathomless.

Today I pick up my last paycheck. My son

yodels at the ceiling. My wife folds towels

before going to her job, her reward for not

writing stories anymore. I watch my son all summer.

Outside, roadwork goes on in light rain.

The steamroller’s under the maple.

As steam swirls off the asphalt, a worker

strides across it, and doesn’t burn.

Larger roller, the storm wraiths down.

The sides of houses, no matter who

lives in them, are luminous in rain.

Summer crouches in the weeds like a burglar.