House

We were all of us there. We three children
for the first time. Our house-proud father,    
the brass door-key trailing on a chain from his hand.  

Our mother’s holding my younger brother’s,   
her mind’s-eye wandering room to room,
locating a sofa here, unrolling carpets there,   

arranging tables and chairs to last the year   
or a lifetime as it happened. Five lifetimes.   
For there were five of us. Yes, and no one but us

exploring the coved-ceiling strangeness,   
the heaviness of plaster-walled rooms, the elegant
rectangles of wan window-light crossing floors.   

                                    *

We kids opened cupboards, drawers. All empty,
as the ghostly thrumming refrigerator was empty.   
As if no one had lived in this house before,  

cooked here or slept, showered here or wept.   
Though my sister, doing her best Nancy Drew,
insisted we search for a sign. Surely someone

left one or two tell-tales behind. We pulled off
shoes, half running, half skating in socks
across chestnut-colored floors and down  

the t-shaped hall to rooms that drew us like heroes,
as if it was honor to first touch each closet’s
end-wall, to slide gamely over cool yellow-tiled

bathroom floor. Nothing. We found nothing.                                                                                                   
No washcloth in the tub.  No residues of soap
at the sinks. No sign of any life but ours

until Mom called us to the back bedroom,  
to a small framed photo barely noticeable
against roses of a faded, papered wall.     

Dad lifted it from a nail, brought the frame
low and we five gathered to consider
the white-haired, dark-suited man

held at the waist by a wrinkled smiling woman,
his arm over the shoulder of a younger man
uniformed for war. They squinted

against bright California sun. They stood
beneath a stucco arch on the front porch
of this very house, now our house. 

                                    *

No way to ask what happened to the photo   
as it’s impossible now for Dad to recall
the rest of that day or those following

when movers trucked us across town, old house
to new. So much is lost as it happens forever.  
Two months after he died I pulled Dad’s suits

from his closet, removed each wood hanger,   
folded coats and trousers, laid them in cartons,
drove the boxes to Goodwill.  How the suits smelled

of him. And four years later I knelt
in the hall outside a bedroom where Mom
lay dying. I was sorting the sixty-year

clutter of family photos nestled in a drawer.     
It wouldn’t be long before I would take
what I wanted, before I’d walk the bare floors

with furniture sold off, packed off, gone.   
For old time’s sake I might take off my shoes.   
But which photos would I choose?    

And of what holiday? From which decade?
So many family faces topping navy blazers
and Easter dresses, or floating above

a white-clothed Thanksgiving table. Before
the house-sale closes should I prop one frame
on the mantle, one picture to signify the lives

that rose and fell inside? But what new owner
would care, or care enough. And afterwards
won’t shadows still follow me room to room,   

the years refuse to let go my hand.  
O what does it mean, what can it possibly mean   
to leave the past behind?