For the record

​

Our first house was a hundred years old.
We bought it from a woman with a pot bellied pig,
who left us some furniture but was missing records, notably

number of:
-cups of sun tea sipped on the porch,
-circles around the living room radio,
-Christmas trees tugged over the threshold,
with measurements.

Who died here, naturally, and who was born,
Who to thank for the plum trees in the backyard,
Who added the crooked wall
that made a tapering hallway to nowhere
(we found your shoe when we took out that wall).

​

For the record—

I planted the hops
that have grown up the side of the greenhouse,

each spring,
there was a Loveliness of Ladybugs
on our daughter’s windowsill,

summers, I hung old sheets for curtains
and we hauled our mattress out
to the sleeping porch,

our son was born in the bedroom off that porch,
after, there was a single drop of blood
at the top of the stairs

that no one but me ever noticed,
and I liked it,
a dark dot reminding me

I am a worldmaker and a dragon
a hundred times a day,
so I left it there.