AN ESTATE SALE




If she hadn't already known
it would have been clear
this is his family reunion:
everyone here
she recognizes without a photograph album
 
    (or an introduction:
    he wandered off
    even before the auction
    began), the light of his self
    refracted as by a prism into its spectrum.
 
Here's a pile of old guidebooks
to elsewhere, inadequate,
obsolete as these slide rules
or that Depression Etiquette.
(He'd said he'd rely on having been there before,
 
    would count on his fingers
    to pick old locks
    though now the doors were strangers'
    and the penciled marks
    marked strange children's heights on the frame of each known door.)
 
She wanders tent to tent, among
trestle tables, a red boxcar
barn, gummy whitewashed tree trunks
in the hornets' orchard
(where hard hollowed peaches hum), along the road--oiled dirt--
 
    down to the farm pond:
    children are rowing
    and bailing. And shouting? The sound
    cuts out. There's no knowing, without subtitles,
    what's the plot of this picture:
 
is a child about to drown
or at least be held under
(by cousins it's never known)
in the algae-veiled water?
Is a flood coming, like the one that stained the parlor
 
    wallpaper, ruined its
    fruitwood wainscoting,
    left jars of pen-nib pitted
    cherries and pickled onions bobbing
    out of the coal-hole chute (freed from the fruit cellar),
 
rusted the upright's strings
and unglued its keys' veneer
while they were waiting
things out on the second floor?
(No one in the family sings or plays: nobody here.)
 
    Or is there no plot
    to these home movies, as there is no album?
    Each snapshot
    in the jumbled shoebox
    could fit into a story anywhere, or nowhere.