The Yellow House, 1978

The kitchen in the house had a nook for eating, a groove

for the broom behind the door and the woman moved through

it like bathing, reaching ladles from drawers, turning to lift

the milk from the refrigerator while still stirring the pudding,

as if the room and everything in it were as intimate to her as her

body, as beautiful and worthy of her attention as the elbows

which each day she soothed with rose lotion or the white legs

she lifted, again and again, in turn, while watching television.

To be in that room must be what it was like to be the man

next to her at night, or the child who, at six o’clock had stood

close enough to smell the wool of her sweater through the steam,

and later, at the goodnight kiss, could breathe the flavor of her hair—

codfish and broccoli—and taste the coffee, which was darkness

on her lips, and listen then from upstairs to the water running

down, the mattress drifting down the river, a pale moonmark

on the floor, and hear the clink of silverware—the stars, their distant

speaking—and picture the ceiling—the back of a woman kneeling,

covering the heart and holding up the bed and roof and cooling sky.

Source: Perennial Fall (The University of Chicago Press, 2006)