The House on Blue Hill Street
Like clouds,
I build people from window sills—
fill in sketchpads of their panes
with Monday nights.
Prints of tennis tournaments
suspend from fridge magnets,
notes for filo dough
fray thumbtacked to a cork overhang—
the recipe, a family heirloom;
the cork, left behind by the home’s
previous owners.
Faces eclipse
across channels of the glass.
I step,
study a perspective painting—
Feather lines
fringe a single mother’s eyes
because Jeopardy skips
on her ex-husband’s TV box—
faulty cable from a man of faults—
and unpopped kernels fumble
between her buttered fingers,
lodge between stitches
of a faux Persian,
also from a past love.
Upstairs, a page
from a child’s coloring book.
A baby wriggles in a bassinet
between dreams
of her mother’s heartbeat
and a father’s Sunday humming,
too young to draw lines
between memory and imagining.
A house of drawings
strung up by cedar boards
on Blue Hill Street—
existence in outlines,
like an artist’s sketchbook
flipped open by the wind.