Cleaning Out the House
The stairs and the storm door and the porch and the door
the fridge and the faucet and the untouched china.
The piles of boxes, the books, the covid test, the diaries
shoved between box store books. Your body found by the police,
your checkbook buried under old prayer manuals, the bird
in the attic left dead and desiccated between boxes and your father’s
journals. I picture myself on the porch still the young, oversized nephew
clutching books in hands still sticky from the candy dish.
The porch is the stage of desire, and I am the Greek actor
turning, masked to cry out the dissolution of the family.
Instead, I am the laborer, the scholar-critic left with your last
texts, the map that draws the lands between diapers and the grave,
the nun’s habit and the sweater and rosary for the casket. When I wrote
your eulogy, your obituary, your prayer card, I was the bearded
evangelist of your death. I put endings and form to the bric-à-brac
hoarder’s mansion in which you lived. Each of your diaries under trash
or tissues, old sweaters or discount romance novels, glowed to my
eyes through the dust. I am the grave-robber, the colonial Egyptologist
whose lungs can take the risk. I open a window, turn to a page.
How your cursive widened with age. The piles of books and trash
and the unwalkable labyrinth from chair to bed made the police
suspect the worst. Your diary settles the matter. On the last page you write:
Please lord let me feel better. Every final prayer
must be unanswered. I know so many who would
toss the journals unread, ignore the transcripts of hospital
confessions, aborted treatments, but the door was unlocked and the dust
and forgotten treasures moldered like a Pharaoh’s tomb.
The house is sold, the dumpster was delivered immediately,
but now, like an apostle, I run from your corpse
with a version of your story and the promise to write.
I catalogued the volumes in a library built to flee.
They are not all read.
Timothy Duffy’s work has recently appeared in the Kenyon Review, Pleiades, trampset, and Salt Hill. He lives outside of Salt Lake City with his wife and three kids and teaches at Utah Valley University.