The Upstairs Room

It must have been in March the rug wore through.

Now the day passes and I stare

At warped pine boards my father's father nailed,

At the twisted grain. Exposed, where emptiness allows,

Are the wormholes of eighty years; four generations' shoes

Stumble and scrape and fall

To the floor my father stained,

The new blood streaming from his head. The drift

Of autumn fires and a century's cigars, that gun's

Magnanimous and brutal smoke, endure.

In March the rug was ragged as the past. The thread

rots like the lives we fasten on. Now it is August,

And the floor is blank, worn smooth,

And, for my life, imperishable.