Emptying Their House

By the time I got there, the table was sold,
and all the chairs, but the phone rang
with strangers' claims to the dining room
furniture, as advertised in the Press Herald.
The dealers had taken their clipboards
home and left us the dirty blue pot
they said was worth so much.

I spent an hour on the bare wooden floor
where the braid rugs had circled once
and I lived old pages of LIFE magazine,
World War II and Jackie Kennedy,
deaths remembered in photographs
of the living.  Those old issues
of history went into my father's box,
beside a picture I found of two faded children,
tinted brown with time, anonymous
in my uncles' genealogies, living stories
in mine.  Slowly the rooms emptied,
the black metal mask came down
from the wall over the bed where I'd dreamed
in terror as a child.  My uncle laid it face
down in his box, empty eyes staring
into shrouds of packing wrap.  Books lined up
on shelves to be sorted.  We kept classics,
coloring books, volumes written by relatives,
art history, world history, natural history,
Facts & Fallacies with its pages of numerology
that I'd pored over countless minutes.  The rest wait,
date cards blank, in the Gorham Public Library.
The backroom carpet bared its stains, the silverware
was polished and put away.  The sons faced
two rows of thick black binders their father
filled with meticulous tales of ancestors, pasted
photographs, labels and tables of people past,
Civil War letters, Mayflower papers.  Who would take
the history home?  The wives pressed to keep
the family together, though it wasn't their family.
The afternoon burned towards sunset, all the living
room a fireplace, a picture window, a shaft of dust,
and the grass outside that stretched to the feet
of a college kid passing by on the sidewalk.

back to Departure:
Original Poems by Kelly Vaughan

by Kelly Vaughan
1996???