A House I Used to Live in

There are many of them around the city,

Houses I used to live in,

Kept my things in,

Passed the time in.

There are a few in other places, too,

But most of them are here, in this city.

One time I counted them all

And there were eighteen.

The number surprised me.

Had I truly left so many behind?

I unfolded a street map,

Smoothing down the creases with my hand

On the kitchen table,

The one I took from home

When my parents bought a new one they couldn’t afford,

And drew a dot with a no.3 pencil

At each spot where I remembered

A house I used to live in.

 

My eye roamed the map,

Curious about how much of the city I’d covered:

Southeast, north central, downtown.

No singular pattern to speak of,

Just a series of relocations

Dictated by the ways circumstances change.

And then I chose one of them. 

Of course, that choice had already been made.

 

I waited a week before I went to see it.

It was mostly how I’d left it,

The grass still unruly, the maple tree in front larger.

Someone had painted the garage,

Once white, now a shade of tan,

Neither dark nor light, just another neutral tone.

There was a swing set in the backyard now.

I could just glimpse it

Craning my head to look around the corner,

Not wanting to stand on the lawn,

Although my foot touched the edge of the driveway,

Cautiously.

The swings were yellow,

The chain of one was tangled,

The seat pointing toward the ground.

 

It was quiet in the neighborhood,

Nothing in the way of traffic,

No presence of children

Despite the swings.

I heard a lawn mower start up, stop, start again,

Farther down the block.

It was the sound of lawn mowers everywhere.   

I could think of many reasons for the stillness,

Unusual or not,

But I preferred my own above the others:

The house was waiting for me,

Waiting for me to begin,

To tell it why I was here.

 

The anger I once felt is gone now.

I’d come to tell the house that.

It’s gone now.  The house,

My house once, where I had lived,

Would want to know that, I believed. 

I wanted it to know,

As well as the tree in front, so much larger now,

Limbs spread wider and higher than I remember,

As if ready to uproot itself

And take wing.

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