Sunday, May 1, 2022: Terry Wolverton's poem "Falling"

 Falling

The house looks the same, except for what’s missing:

the people who lived here, belongings acquired over forty years

Rain-light flickers over walls stripped of mirrors;

only the simplest furnishings remain—couch, bed, table, chair

White telephone hangs on the wall; no one calls

though water still rushes from taps; gas heat whooshes through furnace

Garage laments the disappeared Impala;

deck mourns the vanished table, cocktails on late spring evenings.

Despite my labors to clear it out—bundling

boxloads to move, donate, dump—the house retains its ghostly forms:

Swing jazz burbles through the absent radio,

cards shuffle on kitchen table, vodka swirls in clouded glass.

And I too want to undo the emptying,

stock the bare refrigerator with apples, onions, cheese

I turn on all the lamps in every room,

fill ice cube trays, hang my clothes in closets, draw the curtains wide

Through plate glass, October’s vista blurs as time

crawls backward. Days lengthen, sunsets at 9. Fireflies spark green lawn.

Tumbled reds and golds leap back up to branches,

verdant once more, oblivious of the burning down to come.

© 2022 Terry Wolverton

Terry Wolverton is the author of eleven books of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, including Insurgent Muse: life and art at the Woman’s Building and Embers, a novel in poems. She is the founder of Writers At Work, a creative writing studio in Los Angeles, and Affiliate Faculty in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. https://terrywolverton.net