Mrs. P. Goes House-Hunting

Buzz, buzz, buzz goes the world. We are each in a distortion of our own making.
The glass is half whatever, depending on the day you are having—its etches and
flaws encompassing the mind’s dark hesitations. Mrs. P. went house-hunting.
Trees braided in and out of the clouds, pollen fell like ash onto her windshield.
At one house, Doreen, the realtor, balanced precariously on a step ladder to see
if anyone was home—peering inside: the room loomed like a movie scene, after
the shooting: stripped walls, carpets curled up like infants, fluorescent lights with
cords hanging motionless as the birds and stars in a Miró painting. Bright blue,
dimpled tarp half-covered a boat in the backyard. At another home,a blue plastic
shark hung near the door—mouth open. An address is something we tattoo quietly
onto the self. It whispers its letters and numbers into our breathing until it flies
constantly behind us, like the banners planes drag, undulating across the sky.
You think a place is home and then it’s time to move on. You think you are having
a bad day when you begin to envy the bees, spinning around helpless in a puddle
on a piece of pavement, the sun dousing them in an early summer glow. You envy
the tight little frame that pavement becomes for them. The neat circumference
of their pain. Most of the time loss fails to offer the drama required: the elegant
heroines smoking cigarettes as their lives dwindle away, the enemy troops marching
through the town square. Only Mrs. P. driving from name to name: Cherry Lane,
Admiral Street, Possum Hill, and the laundromat a block away.

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Copyright © 2011 Alexandra van de Kamp All rights reserved
from Arsenic Lobster
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission