THE KITCHEN LIGHT

THE KITCHEN LIGHT

THE KITCHEN LIGHT

If the past is correct, it was here she couldn’t move.
They agreed on shadows, let dust slope across the light
buried watches under the bricks where the damp rose.

Let it be sung! About gravities that pull you down, the sinister
curve of minutes tangling any recall of the point of an argument.
Even the spirits of place had gone, leaving their bottles.

The sounds of doves, more gentle than bruises
pattered the iron, the rust. The path’s slippery green
led from the light of the day past cold blue hydrangeas.

When it got beyond even the curiously patterned logic
of their life, all he could swear at was her name.
Though it was not all he hit her with, as she stood.

At this time she could not turn, either this shabby fortune
or the other key, for the new highway. There was no cure
for a pattern of knuckles and fear blooming through skin.

This was their city. It escaped the high beam of summer
but found among winter’s musty shawls, exacting formations
of the cold. She’d trace them in afternoon on grimy glass.

Between battles all her reasons lined up, ready to go.
Breathing a smell of waves, and a mother wrapping up the night
in a kitchen where the big light lived, her room of light.