Home Bridal
By John M. Anderson
A month before we were married we closed
on the doomed house — eleven thousand dollars
my father's down-payment
wedding present, atonement: money
he'd made humping other people's lawn chairs,
wardrobes, worn
drapes and dryers, snow shovels,
files all year from one such echoing
dream to another. My wife-to-be disappeared to Phoenix
to see
the last July of her single life
in the bone-dry
home of her youth while I
rattled like a wet cough in the chest of this house,
rinsing
away the family grime of those earlier
residents in possession of
that money now. I whacked
veined, itchy weeds in the back yard, hacking —
scrubbed the fragrant stains
from my spoiled hands
in the foul sink, ached
to make this house my body, grow
acquainted with its views, wear
rough back steps to gray
satin with my sole, warm and round the lip
of the attic hatch, hang
window boxes vivid and
heavy with purple bloom
as the shadows weeks of love leave
beneath a honeymooner's eyes. Welcome
my bride at the door of a condition already
broken in. I napped, cheekbone
on the fresh-waxed hardwood floor that gave back
to vacancy the image of open-mouthed slumber,
fogging and clearing in my staggered
breath.
--------------------- Once the tomb
is opened the corruption is swift. I lived
between those walls longer in the thirty days
she wasted in the desert
than in all the thirty months
we were together there, one body.