Ian D. Campbell
It Was Just a House
It was the year in which the plumbing went bad
That the beloved house, feeling perhaps neglected, began to reveal itself in ways
It had previously chosen to keep to itself, the dead, and the demented.
Redwood, granite, level-set oak floors and an emptied bedroom emanating puffs
of white smoke
Where the man who plowed the best break,
Seam
and furrow
Once lay,
Yellow teeth bared in the ineffable discomfort
Of Active Dying.
Where the gentlest woman had clawed
Him in the chest before being gentled off to a place notable for its nurses, her hair growing longer and whiter as out
Through the locks leaked the lady inside.
Observe (my brother and I) merely attempting to plug a leak above the kitchen sink.
In our Grandparents’ home.
It seemed to have sprung as a watery reminiscence from underneath
Green tile, the slab of cement, the redwood four by sixes.
Perhaps the flooding was — in truth — the final rusted fountain of memories we sought
To contain between our wet fingers
We couldn’t get at the pipes; each fat inch of wall so cemented — the facts
Obscured by the forgotten rose garden,
The desiccated orange tree, bark falling off in
surrendering strips
Distributing a few final white petals
About the bronzed lawn.
It was just a house–blessed with a solidity we each still sought
And rusted pipes elusive as cats. (What plumber
Could we have called?) Stopping ourselves short of prying up the floorboards,
Surreptitiously a large luminousness crept in: the leak sprung to provide proofs of what was essential if not entirely enduring.
Tall, ladylike poinsettias bursting crimson by the white double-hung dining room windows,
Big beamed redwood. Granite, horse-carted down from high mountains to pillar
The place.
Cigar smoke off the back porch, fresh squeezed lemonade, cherry pie cooling on the sill,
White bathrobes, Pendleton caps, bamboo fly rods, five irons, Saturday morning Pancakes from scratch and just the four of us in a tidy yellow kitchen.
No sound but the sound of batter bubbling quietly to itself.
Such a Fish
Do you remember the big trout
You caught that summer afternoon
Out on the little lake, hardly more than a
Pond of green and sweetly susurrous waters
In the mountain valley, we had
A small wind, a hot sun, an aluminum row boat your Dad
Could barely manage but
Our lines were tight
Your fine blonde hair lifted by that small wind
Suddenly your slender arms strove
As the rod doubled over and the fine feathery line
Ran like an excitement off the reel and all three hearts beat and once
He even leaped into our world,
Clear of the water
Red and silver and shining like someone’s future
When you were seven and I forty two and we had tight lines
When
Small girls could be happy for hours
After catching
Such a fish.
I Watch You Rise
Now, fifty summers behind me,
I come, at last, to worship you.
From my narrowed kitchen window
I watch you rising in ever higher,
Ever-reaching ranks, Tai Chi to the wind.
I see only now what has long been written:
That you leap back
Ever green, ever graceful
No matter how flattened
No matter how fierce or feral
The hammering of the wind;
That your roots snicker at stump grinder, axe,
Poison, pesticide, salt, even the casting of spells;
That excavation will be as foolish a pursuit
As imprisoning wind. You,
(One of three friends in winter,
Sanctuary from evil)
And the woman inside you
Await, a still field of fallen snow,
Your sole exuberance of flowering.
If but one fine fingerling
Of root remains
Up you jump:
Rising ineradicable and readied,
Supple and slender-leafed,
Reaching to hook the sky,
As I brew the morning coffee, bamboo.
—Ian D. Campbell
