TRETHEWEY, Natasha

Housekeeping

We mourn the broken things, chair legs

wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,

the threadbare clothes. We work the magic

of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.

We save what we can, melt small pieces

of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones

for soup. Beating rugs against the house,

we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading

across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw

the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs

out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.

I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,

listen for passing cars. All-day we watch

for the mail, some news from a distant place.


[I think by now the river must be thick]

For my father

I think by now the river must be thick

with salmon. Late August, I imagine it

as it was that morning: drizzle needling

the surface, mist at the banks like a net

settling around us — everything damp

and shining. That morning, awkward

and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked

into the current and found our places —

you upstream a few yards and out

far deeper. You must remember how

the river seeped in over your boots

and you grew heavier with that defeat.

All day I kept turning to watch you, how

first you mimed our guide's casting

then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky

between us; and later, rod in hand, how

you tried — again and again — to find

that perfect arc, flight of an insect

skimming the river's surface. Perhaps

you recall I cast my line and reeled in

two small trout we could not keep.

Because I had to release them, I confess,

I thought about the past — working

the hooks loose, the fish writhing

in my hands, each one slipping away

before I could let go. I can tell you now

that I tried to take it all in, record it

for an elegy I'd write — one day —

when the time came. Your daughter,

I was that ruthless. What does it matter

if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting

your line, and when it did not come back

empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights,

dreaming, I step again into the small boat

that carried us out and watch the bank receding —

my back to where I know we are headed.

Domestic Work

All week she's cleaned

someone else's house,

stared down her own face

in the shine of copper--

bottomed pots, polished

wood, toilets she'd pull

the lid to--that look saying

Let's make a change, girl.

But Sunday mornings are hers--

church clothes starched

and hanging, a record spinning

on the console, the whole house

dancing. She raises the shades,

washes the rooms in light,

buckets of water, Octagon soap.

Cleanliness is next to godliness ...

Windows and doors flung wide,

curtains two-stepping

forward and back, neck bones

bumping in the pot, a choir

of clothes clapping on the line.

Nearer my God to Thee ...

She beats time on the rugs,

blows dust from the broom

like dandelion spores, each one

a wish for something better.

Pilgrimage

Here, the Mississippi carved

its mud-dark path, a graveyard

for skeletons of sunken riverboats.

Here, the river changed its course,

turning away from the city

as one turns, forgetting, from the past—

the abandoned bluffs, land sloping up

above the river's bend—where now

the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed.

Here, the dead stand up in stone, white

marble, on Confederate Avenue. I stand

on ground once hollowed by a web of caves;

they must have seemed like catacombs,

in 1863, to the woman sitting in her parlor,

candlelit, underground. I can see her

listening to shells explode, writing herself

into history, asking what is to become

of all the living things in this place?

This whole city is a grave. Every spring—

Pilgrimage—the living come to mingle

with the dead, brush against their cold shoulders

in the long hallways, listen all night

to their silence and indifference, relive

their dying on the green battlefield.

At the museum, we marvel at their clothes—

preserved under glass—so much smaller

than our own, as if those who wore them

were only children. We sleep in their beds,

the old mansions hunkered on the bluffs, draped

in flowers—funereal—a blur

of petals against the river's gray.

The brochure in my room calls this

living history. The brass plate on the door reads

Prissy's Room. A window frames

the river's crawl toward the Gulf. In my dream,

the ghost of history lies down beside me,

rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.