...where sight vanishes into nothing...there has to be more
than dust, wind-borne particles of burning earth... - Phillip Levine
What remains of the wooden farmhouse
tucked down off the road
after the fire
is more than the blackened porch planks
or piles of dark cinder
floating across foundation.
What remains are those floorboards
creaking beneath bare feet
after the thunderstorm
drove us in and into each others arms
to hover in candlelight
beneath its weathered roof.
What remains is a dank rattle of shadows
during sleepover parties
with children fled under beds
from ghosts imagined stealing through air
and only in winter.
Summers they’d pump
the well’s rusted lever that gave up
no more than a groan
having given up
on water that could not rise
from an exhausted
spring below.
What remains are those days cradled
inside a bald truck tire
retrieved from the roadside berm
and swinging from bull rope
looped about the muscled arm of oak
lightning struck but couldn’t take down
that remained safe in its promise to stay put
even as it seemed to sigh a surrender
under the weight of us
and even if to wither to bloom but bloom again,
before the landlords
burned the house down
it's worth more as insurance money char than rent.
What remains of that old farmhouse
at the city’s ragged edge
one that would have fared better
out on some cape farther east
taking on the fierceness of wind
or rugged rush of waters
are the years we lived with it
with its pantry full of what
the garden gave up
of its wild garlic, onions, tomatoes, corn
in air fragrant with basil and dill
and the yawn of days
filled with squeals of neighbourhood kids
racing its wraparound porch.
What remains is more
than parch and scorch––its invisible rooms
still forcing themselves up
into a canopy wild with leaves.
[Originally published in the collection 'Landings' by the author]
Andrena Zawinski’s poems have received accolades for free verse, lyricism, spirituality, social concern and have appeared in Progressive Magazine, Rattle, Santa Fe Review, Slipstream, and others with work online at Women’s Voices for Change, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Her fourth full-length collection of poetry is Born Under the Influence.