There’s an old screen door in my heart
and a memory –
bare feet on a worn wooden porch
and a big yellow kitchen
with a stout black stove and sunshine
shambling across the linoleum, warming
the green checkered oilcloth
that holds coffee and yeast breads,
hands pouring coffee, aging hands
browned from summer gardening, fragrant
with yeast and cinnamon, the hands
of six sisters and their white-haired mother.
It’s the sound I remember
voices talking
all at once, answering
without asking in a rhythm and dance
that is older than I, a rhythm
born of years and tears,
resentments and laughter, it’s a truce
without words I am witnessing, hearing
without listening, absorbed
in fishing sodden crumbs from
the bottom of a cup that is mostly milk
splashed with coffee, and I don’t know.
I don’t know that this memory
is imprinting
deep into my skin, like the oilcloth
under my sun-burned arms,
and I don’t know there’s a
black and white film recording,
wrapping around the reel of my heart,
dated July of ’95 and that
I will feel it every year
in aging summer, unwinding
across my memory, asking
if I could just hear it again, in color.
~ s. rochelle
