Chattanooga, Houston Museum, 2003

I realize that the person who inspired this poem has the (relatively) high potential of coming across it... and if she does, first - thank you - and second - sorry, I probably should have asked you first (but the mention is fairly benign, right?). Also, I have no good explanation for why I happened to be thinking about (and subsequently writing about) this particular moment, but it came to me on the subway during rush-hour, so it was likely a willed out-of-body experience.

Liza, I remember the day your cat died.

On the steps of Anna’s preserved Victorian—

laden with courting lamps, scrimshaw

where I was installed, smiling, in the parlor and you

bent at the desk, by the second floor window—

I held you so tight I could smell how you smelled like the ocean

in your sadness.

I could feel the dampness of your back through your cotton shirt,

Damp from the hot river air

that yellowed the paper, that threatened the Toby jugs,

the lusterware—copper, pink, yellow and silver.

We could no more keep it out than it could keep us in,

how we seeped through each other, through the glass and the wooden staircase,

us and the air, pressing to get in and to get out of that space so full and empty.

I could, as we stood pressed together, feel your heart in your chest

pulled to me, the single other living thing in the house of the dead.