RESIDUALS

by Bryan Borland

So often in dreams
the setting is my childhood home,
the garage full of multiplying and subtracting cats,
the yellow-and-orange-streaked linoleum of
the kitchen, the lava of my boyhood games,
the windowless den, a museum alive
with objects long ago lost or left behind,
with things out of sight or just off
the edges of old photographs.
The characters are often out of place,
think Holden Caulfield in fair Verona
or Huck Finn in Revolutionary France,
as if a passenger train on a time-lined track
had its cars rearranged at random,
the giants of my life introduced and allowed to mingle.
My husband stands with me at the cool glass of the front door,
his arms around this ageless version of myself in
a place he never knew.
I can smell the house after my mother cleaned,
can smell the Christmas trees of those young Decembers.
Nothing is strange to me here,
there is nothing unnatural about
this lifetime condensed,
the things most loved remaining.

© Bryan Borland

Advertisement