House-Painting on Liberty Road

Of all the old houses still standing—
blurred, alligatored, crumbling—
on the outskirts of my memory,
when even Weatherbeater paint from Sears
guaranteed to capture, transform, and process
the flow of sun and weather through 1996,
whatever I knew about that one’s
last occupants—friends of my grandfather—
preaching apocalypse, matter chaos,
and heat death,
I heard in their hallelujahs and amens
over my paint-spattered radio
playing the Stones’s Gimme Shelter.

Of all the ladders I raised under
open cornices and brackets—
my weight a bouncing pressure on the rungs
angled against the rock garden wall
and buckled German siding—whatever
I learned about the poor people
who lived in such a ruin,
I glossed over while perched between my myth
of home and their New Jerusalem,
an anchorite wedged into the cliff-face
of the second storey, scraping and painting
the palimpsest of a twenties Craftsman
dissipated and diffused to its
most disordered state.

I was always taken in by the work
on the ladder— scraping down
to old-growth oak, brushing on the hillbilly
chrome of polymer paint—
rather than the nothing that seemed to happen
below me in the hardscrabble of their life.
Of sixty year-old paint flake storms
and blinding fogs of space-age spray rising
over the mast of that reef-wrecked vessel—
even as sea hags and backwoods teasers
stood at the kitchen screen-door and plied me
with Cheerwine and Mountaindew.
Whatever life on the ladder I had
was compromised as I leaned into
the pock-marked skin of
that collapsing organism— smelling
its sour sweat and foul breath,
calculating the exponential growth
of its wasp population whose vespiaries
in the eaves swelled to the size of sunflower heads.

Even as solitary life on the ladder
brought windows around occasionally
for me to trim,
filled with candlelight panes of bubbled glass,
I imagined I looked into a darkened room
and saw a cradle built like the house
in miniature and the child’s sleeping face
showed a perfect peace,
but what I really saw was a dirty
toddler in sagging diapers—
part Cherokee, part Black— standing in
a catbox, crying for her life.