Full House

Herb keeps an old face in every room of the house:

The kitchen tells him to remember stories

The living room teaches him how to tell them

The porch is for candles, fires, and turning quickly

To face a face you love at night

Guilt stays in the bathroom below the stairs

And abstraction
Sits in the shuttered bedroom

With a face that’s dark as night.

When the upstairs hallway floods with light

It’s for youth and distraction.

But the foyer he left just for her

Because it reminded him of birth and salvation.

He never goes there anymore—

A neighbor moved an armoire in the hallway

To shut it off.

There’s an immigrant’s gate that lines the lot

And a garden planted by a woman in 1901.

The yard is small and rectangular.

Vines grow up the lattices.

The porch is gray and even
With dust—and a neighbor joked that even

The wind stopped calling those green-framed screens

That oscillate between life and death.

On Tuesday nights, when Herb sheds his gown
To shuffle out and into town—

Down to Molly's Pub down by the water—
The whole house is turned
And pictures turn their faces
And blink

As the door turns into a shutter.

They wait for him—holding
Smiles—until he comes home drunk,
Opens the door, and lays face down
Before them on the floor.

He was playing playing cards, he tells them.
The old lie.

But they smile back now—every one.