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Familia
Orion sweeping
Approaching midnight,
you on a ladder
planted in the berm
that slumped from the solar panels
before rain and graupel
made this sticky amalgam
that will foil our clever plan
for photon capture
after days of snow,
our batteries and comfort
running down.
So I brace the ladder
at this crazy hour
while you get the job done,
preparing for sunrise
on the second longest
night of the year.
The array rears
against the blueprint sky
like the wings of a satellite,
gargantuan contraption
for phoning home,
while you, apologizing,
send avalanches down,
plastering me, stuccoing the dog,
who shrugs off her surprise
with the usual equanimity
(she loves the cold, the night,
the trace of mice on the ground).
I take my chances,
scanning the sky
while we plunge at a thousand
klicks per second
toward the Great Attractor
and constellations
dredge the near horizon
of blackened cedars
oh so slowly. There, Orion,
whom some call Winter Maker,
belt and dagger sharp as ice,
pitches back-footed
to load his bow; and you,
Winter Sweeper, thin as a diagram
underneath your duffled
silhouette, aim your push-broom
against the dark, leaning
to the edge of the glass,
swinging, one-footed,
in your orbit,
for the moment
undisturbed
by the reckless earth.
Clearing windthrow from the trail
Striking, how trees
so often fall in pairs
like the long married,
the ground heaving
under one and then
so quickly the other
that itās hard to say
which was propping,
which leaning,
or whether theyād grown
together so closely
that it was all the same.
We slice the boles
with bow saw and
pull saw rather than lug
the new Stihl all this way,
but use the cutting
order we were taughtā
compression, then tensionā
to avoid pinching the blades.
Even in these soft logs
straddling the path, balsam,
slender, we hear the snap
of the last fibres taking
the remaining weight,
then breaking.
Wash day
After forty-seven years
the laundry tub gave out.
Just like that.
Finally, my mother said,
like sheād been waiting for this day
to dispense her standard line:
Well, nothing lasts forever.
Just think of the uses
for that phraseāinfatuations,
lilacs, good ice for skatingā
the curiously strong lozenge
she always had ready
to clear our minds of grief.
(Cool as peppermint she was,
the day I left my husband.)
But Iād have to say
that in the family inventory
of things that didnāt last,
the double concrete laundry tub
was the most surprising.
It sprang a leak and we said,
It was bound to happen eventually,
as if we really had believed
that such a simple thing could fail.
Those modern detergents, my father said,
were eating out the wire mesh
all this time.
The sound was quite a shocker:
metal on stone,
rising from the basement
while they whacked the thing
into pieces.
Clang
forty-seven years
clang.
Tough as the dickens,
my father said, resting
the sledgehammer on the floor.
When my mother took it from his hands
he showed her where to land the blows.
