The Flood

               -- Rye, New York

          The weather of my childhood
          existed between the trees--
          the grass lighting its green flame
          over and over again. But in autumn,
          all brightness would blink out,
          and this was when the gray,
          growing eye of the water
          crept up our lawn. The nearby brook
          spilling itself over what it thought it was.

          How we learned to note
          in the rain's sodden song
          the coming of something
          that was more than ourselves--
          a flat, solemn god, spreading itself
          across the obedient lawns of our world.
          And when the signs came,
          we'd wait, four anxious disciples,
          as my mother counted the basement steps:
          one, two, three swallowed up
          in the creeping gray. And on the seventh,
          we'd park the car at the top of the street--
          leaving it to its own kind of sleep--
          and spend the night with friends
          to learn the strange rules of other homes:
          how their lamps could cast softer hues
          than our lamps at home, their carpets spread
          exotic reds and blues.

          Meanwhile, the water swirled its luxurious,
          deep script through our world.
          What did the trees see as they bowed
          towards what was beneath them--
          their own thick bodies
          stretched out across the muddiness
          of this earth-bound heaven?
          At school, from fingerprint-
          smeared windows, our breath
          fogging the view,
          we'd watch the water                                                                                                                                                                                            
          churn across the football field
          and know we still couldn't go home.                                                                   

          And when we did return, what differences
          we found. The grass pulled this way,
          then that--busy with its own hieroglyphics--
          all the tulips uprooted in the garden,
          and stones lifted, as if by blind hands,
          to be found, bewildered,
          in foreign parts of the yard.
          But the worst was the basement.
          Its walls coated in mud.
          Each box smelled silvery and wet,
          patient as the rain that had passed
          right through it, and all the books were stained
          with the quivering islands and continents
          of water--their pages wrinkled into waves,
          as if to adopt the features
          of what had taken them over.

          And us? We were left to clean up.
          Our bodies awkward and shy
          in this newly baptized world.
          Each object, a small, persistent god,
          calling us back to it, telling us
          to love what we had. And we came back
          for the front steps and gravel drive,
          for the bushes winking with green
          beneath the traces of mud,
          for this one-quarter acre of house and lawn,
          so stubbornly alive, warning us
          of how tenuously this world
          held on to our lives.


          Alexandra van de Kamp  (Click for bio.)


      


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