Ellen
Taylor
One
very fine critic one called Frost the poet of "probability," and
in Ellen Taylor's fine poem there is that same sense of the probability
that flows from an event as basic as taking down the house.
TAKING DOWN THE HOUSE
My husband relishes the
crow bar,
he pulls off the wall’s
housedress of plaster
as if it were diseased,
unprys the ribs of lath
that wave across
the rooms from post to
beam,
and celebrates the new open
space.
One hundred and fifty years
ago,
someone mixed this plaster
of clam shell
and horse hair. Whose job
was it
to gather clams and crush
the shells?
As I shovel the rubble of
once wall, I find clumps
of sorrel and wonder, whose
mare
or gelding, did it pull the
family sleigh?
Did the coat fall out in
handfuls
as forsythia bloomed?
In the kitchen, layers of
wallpaper.
A woman hung each roll, I
imagine a Rosa,
choosing the blue floral
pattern one spring,
replacing it years later
with the American Eagle
after wood smoke had grayed
the kitchen garden.
I see her kneading bread by
the window
stoking the stubborn
woodstove fire,
scrubbing the weekly wash.
I wish we could sit down
together, share a cup of tea,
talk about the best way to
cook fiddleheads,
make mulberry jam, clean
out a well.
The wrenched lath and
crumbled plaster
makes me feel sick and
sorrow
for this solid house. I
hope it will forgive us.
If these walls could talk,
they might share
a birthing story, a wake. They might teach us
about time, what matters,
or matters not.
At day’s end the tiny
kitchen joins the dining room
and becomes one. We sit in
the debris
banking the center chimney,
rest our weary backs on the proud brick.
I think of Rosa, her
wallpaper, her recipes.
I forgive my husband, his
joy of destruction.
We will settle, like the
dust.
Ellen Taylor
is a teacher of writing at the University of
Maine in Augusta. She and her husband live in Appleton, ME.
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