National Poetry Month 2014: ... holding up the bed, the roof, the cooling sky and covering the heart
The first time that I attended the Mass Poetry Festival, she read this in one of the rounds in a face-off with Robert Pinsky. Reading it in print now is such a different experience than watching her read it from the third row back, watching her sweat bead up but her smile so calm and loving with a difficult memory.
My mother sat next to me at that reading. Yes, she said, simply, when the reading was done, as when one would say "yes" when a cop or a clerk read back a transcribed statement: Yes, that's what I said.
The Yellow House, 1978
by Maggie Dietz
The kitchen in the house had a nook for eating, a groove
for the broom behind the door and the woman moved through
it like bathing, reaching ladles from drawers, turning to lift
the milk from the refrigerator while still stirring the pudding,
as if the room and everything in it were as intimate to her as her
body, as beautiful and worthy of her attention as the elbows
which each day she soothed with rose lotion or the white legs
she lifted, again and again, in turn, while watching television.
To be in that room must be what it was like to be the man
next to her at night, or the child who, at six o’clock, had stood
close enough to smell the wool of her sweater through the steam,
and later, at the goodnight kiss, could breathe the flavor of her hair-
codfish and broccoli-and taste the coffee, which was darkness
on her lips, and listen then from upstairs to the water running
down, the mattress drifting down the river, a pale moonmark
on the floor, and hear the clink of silverware-the stars, their distant
speaking-and trust the ceiling-the back of a woman kneeling,
holding up the bed, the roof, the cooling sky and covering the heart.
My mother sat next to me at that reading. Yes, she said, simply, when the reading was done, as when one would say "yes" when a cop or a clerk read back a transcribed statement: Yes, that's what I said.
The Yellow House, 1978
by Maggie Dietz
The kitchen in the house had a nook for eating, a groove
for the broom behind the door and the woman moved through
it like bathing, reaching ladles from drawers, turning to lift
the milk from the refrigerator while still stirring the pudding,
as if the room and everything in it were as intimate to her as her
body, as beautiful and worthy of her attention as the elbows
which each day she soothed with rose lotion or the white legs
she lifted, again and again, in turn, while watching television.
To be in that room must be what it was like to be the man
next to her at night, or the child who, at six o’clock, had stood
close enough to smell the wool of her sweater through the steam,
and later, at the goodnight kiss, could breathe the flavor of her hair-
codfish and broccoli-and taste the coffee, which was darkness
on her lips, and listen then from upstairs to the water running
down, the mattress drifting down the river, a pale moonmark
on the floor, and hear the clink of silverware-the stars, their distant
speaking-and trust the ceiling-the back of a woman kneeling,
holding up the bed, the roof, the cooling sky and covering the heart.