What Holds It's Own

pond.
stalk of grass.

What Holds Its Own

Whatever disquiet we sense in a room

we have brought there.

And so I instruct my ribs each morning,

pointing to hinge and plaster and wood—

You are matter, as they are.

See how perfectly it can be done.

Hold, one day more, what is asked.

                                                Jane Hirshfield

                                                A Room

Because they didn’t want to disturb

the living the parlor was set aside

to wake the dead.  I’ve read that

somewhere, how the term living room

came about because that’s all

that was allowed to happen there.

I don’t know for sure, and I don’t have

a parlor—though maybe that room—

in this house at least, would be

the den, and already the dead are

accumulating there: my grandmother

by way of her trunk, the one

she brought back east from Minnesota

after having been gone for twenty-

one years.  I can’t begin to guess

what was in it before my mother

put our old blankets, sheets—what wouldn’t

fit in her cedar chest, the one solid thing

she brought with her, that locked her

treasures when she moved them

from Salem.  My sister has that now, maybe

in her own living room.  I’ve never been

to her house but in other houses she’s lived

in I saw it, and the old rocking chair (another

piece from Salem), and maybe above it

my father’s 1960s Navy graduation photo

she won’t give back.  Maybe her house

is more a cemetery than mine, though

I’d argue it holds its own: a leather chair

a man I admired read to his granddaughter

in; a bookcase and the books inside; all

the books all around even, and still

living, the daughters and daughters of spider

plants and cacti, children’s children’s
children, new leaves, old root.  And too:

in a small wooden urn, a teaspoon maybe two,

of my friend’s ashes—what didn’t

get scattered, ten years now

at my elbow.  When I move back

home I have to find a suitable spot

somewhere, and in a brighter room—

maybe on that trunk next to the leather

chair.  What’s all in it: the kids’ stuffed toys,

a Brother typewriter, rocks I’d forgotten

about, coal maybe, and of course, those old

love letters, still holding their own,

closed up in their carefully cut open

envelopes, whispering the only

words they know to stave off the dark: Dearest,

I love you, I miss you, I’ll wait

for you, when are you coming back.

I put them under the pillows I’d meant

to decorate the couch with, where

we sat, lustful rush of arms

and legs and breath, hinging

and unhinging, coming up

for air after all that plunging, like any

lovers do I suppose, when they are

living and alive.