My old uncle Truman, a career military man
\nused to being in charge, was the first of us inside
\nmy mother’s house, followed by Bonnie,
\nthe high-school sweetheart he’d returned to
\nin the Ozarks after the sudden death of his wife,
\nnext, his Ozark sister Dot and brother Wallace.<\/p>\n
then me. We didn’t visit the greenhouse with its torn
\nplastic ceiling and desiccated plants on the table
\nand hoses on the floor tangled in pots and coffee cans.
\nYet the house was all my aunt needed to have nightmares
\nfor two weeks afterward, shocked that whenever her older
\nsister called her long distance from New Hampshire<\/p>\n
late at night, telling her stories about the workers
\nat her nursery and big sales of the forsythia my dead
\nstepfather once developed, she sat at a desk surrounded
\nby piles of old bills and newspapers, or worse,
\nin the bathroom on the toilet seat’s matted, black fur
\ntalking on the portable phone among magazines scattered<\/p>\n
all over the floor. “How can she live like this?” Dot asked,
\nbecause everyone understood you had to keep things
\nin their proper places to know where they were.
\nBut here, my stepfather’s overalls and shirts,
\nwhich belonged in the closet, were hanging on the bar
\nof the shower stall, and his shoes were beneath them<\/p>\n
in the unwashed tub, and the floor was such a mess
\nneither she, unsteady on her swollen legs, nor Truman,
\non his cane, dared venture beyond the door frame.
\nBack in the living room, I found Wallace, who wore
\na wide bandage across his bald head, searching
\nthrough the bookshelf for the family bible my mother<\/p>\n
accused him of stealing after my grandmother’s
\nfuneral, having forgotten that she took it herself.
\n“Ten to one, it burned up in the fire she had,” he said
\nwith a sigh, probably because now he couldn’t
\ncarry it back to the rehab hospital and show it to her
\nas he smiled the same smile that my grandmother<\/p>\n
couldn’t resist in her youngest son, and that my mother
\nalways hated, thinking of all he got away with
\nwhen he was a child, and he, remembering all
\nshe used to blame him for. Yet there was plenty here
\nfor him to gloat about. In the kitchen with Bonnie,
\nTruman tried the faucet over the sink, which chugged,<\/p>\n
then blasted black water on the encrusted pans
\nin the sink. “My God, they’s a big mouse trap in between
\nthe cans on the floor!” Dot exclaimed. Truman shut
\nthe faucet off hard with a scowl, more upset
\nthan she was, for after living his whole life by rules
\nand order, he must have felt he was now standing<\/p>\n
in disorder itself. “She’s lost her grip for sure,” he said,
\nthe faucet still fast in his hand, and we others agreed,
\nbecause for each of us, life had to do with holding on,
\nhowever you managed it, against surprises and losses,
\nTruman returning to the past with his high-school
\nsweetheart, Aunt Dot, disoriented unless she knew<\/p>\n
where things belonged, Uncle Wallace, distracted
\nfor now from his growing cancer by a family grudge,
\nand I myself, who in my grief for a failing mother
\nhad brought these dear, diminished siblings
\nfrom their visit at the hospital to see the stacks
\nand piles and pathways as if the house were a problem<\/p>\n
that somehow we could fix. Bent to our purposes,
\nwe missed the message right there around us,
\nthat even as we held on by turning away from loss,
\nmy old, exasperating mother, grown tired
\nof turning away, had reached out to embrace it, holding
\nonto everything she had so tightly it could never leave.\n
Follow McNair’s thinking about this poem through his revisions of it. (Line changes are highlighted in yellow; revised line breaks are indicated by yellow verticals.)<\/span><\/p> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\t\t