Housekeeping

Here at last was a day for catching up. Laundry, bill-paying, phone calls to robotic voices that ask my birth date and my mother’s maiden name, as if those numbers and that name were not scars. Unopened mail I stacked up last month or the month before. Scraps of paper with phone numbers, dates, the amount of insurance deductible I still have to pay. This poem, as intimate, as familiar, and as painful as my mother’s maiden name.

Housekeeping
by Natasha Trethewey

We mourn the broken things, chair legs
wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,
the threadbare clothes. We work the magic
of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.
We save what we can, melt small pieces
of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones
for soup. Beating rugs against the house,
we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading
across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw
the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs
out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.
I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,
listen for passing cars. All day we watch
for the mail, some news from a distant place.