We passed the time in shade unaware until
Russet skin descending in winter
to carbon upon the pavement, it
Caught the corner of my eye
Red passing to brown, falling
gray black dust in my lungs
Passing again I could not point to the fallen leaf
but it is part of me
Chlorophyll in the oxygen viscera
I smell my dad’s house sometimes
While sweeping, maybe,
Like some particle of the psychic past stirred by our labor in common. He swept, too.
A man who didn’t believe in vacuum cleaners,
he believed in me; and somewhere I register that in an olfactory way. The same way you hear voices when you drift off to sleep. Voices from other rooms and other times. He told me he heard his mother that way, her voice clear as a navy bell in the night.
How will I hear my own?
Her house had a smell that was mine too,
My Monday to Friday smell from the metes and bounds.
Hoover in the closet an oblique sort of foreboding.
Sweep first, then mop the floor. Drive across town, then vacuum some more.
a butterfly backpack glows
aquamarine, upright
on the centerline of Tharpe Street
empty, illuminated
by the orange cream dusk at one end of the road
against purple green nightfall at the other
I watch it shrink in the rearview mirror
A winged ceremony before my house!
I broke in upon a Robin to the east, plucking things from the earth
A Cardinal to the north, bathing with an invitation in the basin before the door
A gaggle of Finches to the west, shifting beneath the shrubs behind the hedge
This quadrilateral domain is theirs more than mine:
Cradle and bunk bed and tunnel and train and flight pattern and gravestone and
yes, this backyard transect
I caught them at guilty pleasures:
Buried beneath the mantle of my rented lawn;
Bathing upon a pedestal;
Flittering beyond the shapes of my steel instruments;
Raucous like a jungle aviary in the warm sun slanting before the rains resume.
C.B. Crenshaw 