Fall Cleaning
Books read, unread, and never-will-be-read,
jottings, the remains of paid bills, old tax forms,
unopened software, letters years old still to be
answered, manuals, CD’s, Judith’s note saying
Cecily’s ballet class has been canceled 20 years
ago, a picture of my mother, in her 30’s, standing
by Arthur Melrose dressed in a dinner jacket. out-
side the frame of the picture 1-1/2 X 2-1/2, black
and white, fading, live his brothers, and Helen
and Jennie, his sisters – and Jennie’s Model T with
the rumble seat ancient even then and her picking me
up at the train station at Huntington, Long Island,
the clatter of her car louder than the great diesel,
I hungry for sliced cheese and Ritz Crackers.
The morning after. Everything spread about the family
room looking for order, for boxes, for trash cans, for
attention, the chains and palaces of my life. I lie in bed
reading Jorie Graham, “The earth curves more than
I had thought /at first.” I walk along the shore of an ancient
beach. Yesterday sinks just beyond the horizon. I poke
among the seaweed for what is left, cast up, from the
shipwreck of each day, 365 a year, back and back,
“In the beginning, there was…”
by Nils Peterson
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