Home on Wheels

Mama is gone now and

the house is mine,

that mansion with cedar siding

and white appliances.

When I was 12 that house

had sprung from under our mobile home,

from a patch of brown earth revealed

when the old house was pulled away

like a magician's scarf.

They have no business in that house,

said the ladies after church,

No business with a fireplace

and a balcony, they said.

Now I sit on my bed,

a bed made for five years,

the comforter smoothed

many times by my mother's hand

in expectation that one day

I would come.

But there are no memories here--

my memories are of a different bed

beneath a sagging shelf of books.

My memories are of brown shag carpet

worn thin near the door.

My memories are of my hamster

lost inside the sofa,

finally peeking out of the hole in the arm,

of an avocado green kitchen and

plastic-jeweled chandelier so low

it almost touched the tabletop,

of red velvet bedspreads and rusty swingsets,

of dead pets with cardboard headstones,

and of the concrete porch,

the cinderblock steps

where mama grew roses all around.

Those things were ours:

those cinderblocks, those leaky ceilings,

those roses!

But not this empty place

where we walk through rooms

too white.

Not this, no,

but my mama in bellbottoms,

the smell of grease,

my daddy with muscles and two jobs.

The "For Sale" sign rises now

from the periwinkle.

The papers are signed, the taxes paid.

From the driveway I turn north,

and soon I am in Hosford,

remembering that

the trailer came here

and went down a dirt road.

I thought I'd find it,

a piece of junk,

brown and faded,

find other people's children

tossed onto the lawn to play

among slip-n-slides, among anthills

and rusty cars.

But instead a woman says that they left

years ago, the house too.  She wipes her

hands on a dirty apron and shuts the door.

The lot is full of weeds.

I find a baby doll's arm,

oyster shells,

a lawnmower blade,

a bucket with a rusted-out bottom.

As the evening comes in

I sit on a stump,

and light a cigarette.

Mosquitoes buzz in my ears

and the swamp exhales

fireflies in sparkling clouds.

"I’m back," I say to them

as they slip from the trees.