The Widow, the House, the Porch and the Stars

If we’d have known how bad the mosquitoes would get, the relentless
swarms we’d see each summer, we’d have built a screened-in porch,
though I hate the way they look — like a room piled up with magazines
we’ll never read, like distant sunlight that can never overcome the chill
of an artificial shade, like my childhood’s early memory of yet another
heat-soaked afternoon spent on my dead grandmother’s porch,
the one in her first house, the house she kept the longest, where she
boxed herself in with stacks of books and papers underneath
a glass barometer’s green fluid that I never learned to read —
but maybe I hate more the welts on my legs, the blooming red
on my daughter’s skin when she steps out back for less than a minute,
for the time it takes to call the dog, and I wish I’d thought more
about screens, about how to be inside and out at the same time,
but there is my grandmother, older than in my clearest memories
but younger than at her homebound end, standing in the one space left
between her brick house and its wooden porch, in that uneven
threshold before she started having her falls, and I see my days
stretch out in unopened New Yorkers, Ritz crackers eaten straight
from the tube, and I can’t bring myself to make iced tea,
though it’d be better to drink than the can of Coke I sometimes
allow myself on a rainy afternoon when I can barely keep
my eyes from drifting closed while the font on the monitor
swims around, but iced tea is just another brick in our family’s
herringbone path, leading us to an old age trapped inside all the things
we never made ourselves do, or maybe inside all the things we never
made ourselves look at, and I can’t imagine putting a screen
between me and the yellowwood we planted at my daughter’s birth,
back when the relentless sun had made our stoop too hot to sit on,
and now the full-grown compound leaves are big enough to shelter
whole mosquito parties that bite me and my daughter whenever
we wander outside, but at least we see them, at least the piles
of books around us are of ones we have mostly read, and I go on
and drink the soda I shouldn’t have on days when a change in
barometric pressure squeezes my head like a hand-drawn printing press,
ink laid down against my closed eyelids, while I wait for the plate’s release
thanks to caffeine, or rain, or the magic of a triptan, so we spray
another chemical on our legs, our arms, the back of our shirts,
and we step outside, where the yellowwood eats all the sun,
and I risk throwing away the Sunday Times I never got around
to reading, all of it, the magazine, the editorials, the breaking news,
I risk stepping out onto our weathered, open porch as some fragment
of sun slides past pinnate formations overhead and a bird too
mottled and small for me to accurately identify makes some crazy pass
at the squirrel-proof feeder as it waits for space to land on the swinging ledge,
while the chipmunk noses around before it realizes our small black dog
has come down the steps to stalk it, and I risk sitting down in the plastic
Adirondack-style chair, in its comfort and its impermanence, because
as much as I try to remember, I still don’t know what my grandmother
might have been looking at when she sat on her wrought-iron divan,
with its green plastic cushion and its frayed piping, as she sat all afternoon
in her screened-in porch with its towers built of coffee table books,
movie and wartime histories, Time magazines, decades’ worth of
price guides for Derby glasses, Wall Street Journals that her husband
read when he’d been still alive, all stacked up around her, growing taller,
in the end, than her seated silhouette, but despite how long she sat there,
every day, on the phone, iced tea in hand, I don’t think she ever looked outside.