Invoked Detritus and Dust

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

Today, strangely clearly, I recall, or rather,
the memory blends, imposing itself
on the projection screen of my mind, thick
beige paint from 1979 on the walls of the
long hallway in my grandparents' house,
and the feel of their coarse, heavy towels,
already probably three decades old, and
the smell of the water from the bathroom
sink. I always remember how water smells
different wherever you go.

Big house like a cave, or a warren for bears,
thin curtains motionless, straight down in
defeat, except when my grandmother spied
out melodramas going down in the shabby
trailer park across the street. Everything
there my grandfather built himself back in the
50s. That house's silent sounds are once more
resounding, or weekend radio when Paul
Harvey was young, and interminable Worldwide
Church of God broadcasts, and the tinny, tacky
commercials on the A.M.

My daughter crawls out of bed, another
late-blooming bear, still in pajamas, her brain
not even trying to come to terms with the singing
cicadas outside, unhearing, unaware that
they're even there. I ask her to get dressed and
she wonders whether we're going somewhere.
We're racing down rivers she doesn't suspect, but
thirty years hence even she may recall a certain
odor of water, or thick paint in a hall.