A Poem for my Love

Countries

With each extinguished light
the house contracts.
The Japanese lamp
with the purple Indian scarf
draped over it-
the fireplace, the 1910 French upright,
the whole living room-turned-
office -gone.
The bare bulb in the tiny hall
across from our pantry,
dining room and Thomas’
miniature jewel paintings -gone.
In the kitchen the red swag lamp
and the white (on one switch),
the window box with Lily
of the Peace, the little ficus
and African Violet Christie brought
along with her guitar -gone.
The stove still stands in light,
shed by the hood bulb, but there’s no need
for it to keep vigil, though you often
leave it on -gone. A hall door closes,
separating beds and bath from
the daytime spaces. A nightlight
shines above the sink, keeping
the bathroom with its Polynesian
wood-framed mirror with us
as we leave for our respective rooms.

This morning, I noticed the dark nothing
beyond the hallway door and understood:
You don’t want your first task to be
retrieving the kitchen for us from the night.
You’d rather it wait through to morning,
ready to give its space for breakfast
at the wooden table we bought at Paradise Garage-
Organic cereal with fresh blueberries,
marion berries, golden grapes and
apricots you cut into small pieces
before dropping them into my bowl.

©2007 Brol Gemmer. All right reserved.

The Magic of Life is in the Details even more so than in the Grand Events.

Half an hour northeast of Colville, Washington, on a Sunday in January after you've climbed out of an afternoon-pink-tinted valley and arrived at the house. The snow lays piled three feet high and it's sticky. This you will find out after you've made a snow angel and it won't come out of your hair, or off the socks, sticking out of the tops of your boots.

The snow's under-surface, where it rests on the tin roof has grown a layer of ice at the end of each day of the slightest thawing (this from the warming from within the building), and each day it has slid until it's formed a beautiful fold, like a succulent silk-satin cloth, draping itself over the edge of the roof. It looks mellow, but is hard and harsh when it meets with a tall man's forehead and nose bridge.

And then there are the endless pines heaped with winter goodness, looking so cliche, yet irresistibly beautiful. But nothing compares in beauty to the moment when you stand, after the dog has finally succumbed to its need and tinkled in the snow, making a perfect little hole that looks as if she's just peed a yellow dot, and you become suddenly aware of silence.

You notice it has been years during which you've forgotten the existence of such silence, of the absence of sound, and you wish you could have this always, this sense that the world is a cathedral, awing and immensely blessed.