The Things That Take Root
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| @Stefan Seggarro |
The Things That Take Root
1.
We planted the house in the usual way, with debt and optimism,
a sapling by the fence, two chairs facing the weather.
The marriage grew like ivy, charming until it reached the gutters.
We raised children, raised ceilings, raised hell over the plumbing.
Every spring, the roots pushed deeper beneath our arguments.
We called it maintenance, this endless tending of soil.
It took a lifetime to discover we had been growing shelter.
2.
A pear lies split in the grass, its flesh sweetening into rot.
Wasps in their yellow waistcoats hold a conference at the wound.
A ladder leans against the tree like a retired fireman,
its rungs polished by the boots of a younger man's urgency.
I used to curse the fruit for falling before I was ready.
Now I stoop with both hands, negotiating terms with my knees.
The smallest harvest has become a matter of considerable ceremony.
3.
The kitchen window frames a postage stamp of afternoon.
Dust performs its slow ballet above the radiator.
Your coffee cup leaves a brown continent on the table,
a map of mornings neither of us thought to remember.
The clock keeps charging rent for every passing second.
I sit beneath its jurisdiction, waiting for the kettle,
rich in everything money cannot persuade to stay.
4.
In the attic, a cardboard box exhales thirty years of dust.
Your photograph lies beneath a Christmas wreath missing its berries.
There you are, all dark hair and unspent tomorrows,
wearing the fearless expression of someone who hasn't met a deductible.
My knuckles have grown their own small architecture of pain.
I touch your younger face, careful not to wake the paper.
Outside, the apple tree drops another year into the grass.
5.
We grew this place without knowing what the harvest would cost,
watering the roots with wages, worry, laughter, and ordinary afternoons.
Now our hair has gone the color of winter's unclaimed ashes,
and every scuffed floorboard holds the weight of a vanished footstep.
The window, the pear, the photograph, the dust all speak your name.
I would trade every grand adventure for one more morning beside you,
to sit in the house we grew and watch the light find us still here.
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This is an incredible write! I definitely think you should seek to have it published...for me, it's that amazingly good. You have mastered the form.....and the subject matter is something many can relate to.
ReplyDeleteSomehow this line "Your photograph lies beneath a Christmas wreath missing its berries." struck me as the most poignant (and I use that word in a very good way). I think I may be more sensitive to this and your poem here today because yesterday was the 13th anniversary of my husband's 6-minute cardiac arrest. Every year I write a "Because of you...." thank you letter to what I call the "angels along the way" who kept him tethered to this earth. Thirteen years ago today, right this minute, the "ccoling" agent was stopped and his body (on total life support) was being slowly brought back to normal temperature. They did this to protect h is brain. I was told it would take 72 hours for him to "perhpas" gain consciousness....and even then, there was only a 5% chance he would be cognitively okay. I sit here, and just watched him walk down the hall....and yes, he is 100% cognitively himself. He is truly a walking miracle....and so, everything in your poem here hit me....This is an amazing write.
Thank you for your kind words. This one came easy, I just opened a vein. :-)
DeleteYour cadralor certainly took root, Chris! I love all the imagery, so it was hard to choose specific phrases or lines. That said, I do love the ‘wasps in their yellow waistcoats’ holding a conference’, the simile ‘a ladder leans against the tree like a retired fireman’, and the kitchen window framing ‘a postage stamp of afternoon’. Oh, and these lines:
ReplyDelete‘Your coffee cup leaves a brown continent on the table,
a map of mornings neither of us thought to remember.’
There is a lovely rolling narrative to this memory packed Cadralor - so evocative and vivid that as Lillian says so deserving of being published somewhere - the Cadralor site welcomes submissions I believe
ReplyDeleteBRAVO!!!
ReplyDeletemuch love
This is truly outstanding, Chris! I love every line of it. ❤️❤️
ReplyDeleteExcellent poem. You tell the story of the passage of time so well with your disconnected lines.
ReplyDeleteDebt, rent, a deductible, wages: the bills run quietly through all five stanzas, which makes “someone who hasn’t met a deductible” the funniest and saddest line in the attic.
ReplyDelete