Inner Rooms


To contain so much hatred when the hated are dead,
where does one put it? It fills the hung purses
in closets, the coat pockets, the cigar boxes,
it gleams beside the cuff links and tie clasps
in their crushed velvet spring-boxes.

If you cannot find it, it may be you
suspended in the blown glass perfume stopper,
beside the shoehorns and mortuary rulers,
the free pencils that will never be sharpened,
in the paper clips, twisted, confused, shackled
one to another.

Where, having been given the satin folds of lingerie,
their sheen and shadow like an ocean in a drawer,
do you begin?
Our parents’ rooms become museums.
The hat boxes heaped with photos,

unlabeled, sorted by decade,
is this where it is? The answer? The essence?
Beside the revolver under his handkerchiefs,
in our bronzed baby shoes, laced forever,
in the see-through model
of the human circulatory system,
its branching blues and reds,

or in the broken Westclox, it’s alarm set for 1944?
The loose pearl she picked up, but never restrung?
The gouged surface of the Vaseline?
Where is that spark that made the world inevitable,
where is that apron, that blew in furls
around your mother’s waist
as she stood on the front steps to call you in?

This is as deep as you go. There is no more to them
than us. Our skins thin,
our inner lives grown cold. There is no key
taped to a drawer bottom, not one fingerprint
on one dusty light bulb, no trace of the moment
before they let go, turned their faces to the wall.

Is this what love is, this rage
to have and know? To string the pearls,
to wear that moon on a strand of her long hair,
orbiting the heart, translucent testicle,
tiny lump in the breast?
What was it that was done? Who did it

and said the others didn’t need to know?
Or who did not smile and kiss you here and here,
who did not set the cocktail down to smooth your hair
with two cool hands.

How can we know,
when nothing can ever open the wall safe of silence?
And we must fashion the world again
without the painting that hung over it,
without certainty, without closure,
without them.

Natural Causes, Pitt Poetry Series, 2004.