Shirley Buettner

Two wind chimes, one brass and prone to anger, one with the throat of an angel, swing from my porch eave, sing with the storm. Last year I lived five months under that shrill choir, boxing your house, crowding books into crates, from some pages your own voice crying. Some days the chimes raged. Some days they hung still. They fretted when I dug up the lily I gave you in April, blooming, strangely, in fall. Together, they scolded me when I counted pennies you left in each can, cup, and drawer, when I rechecked the closets for remnants of you. The last day, the house empty, resonant with space, the two chimes had nothing to toll for. I walked out, took them down, carried our mute spirits home.

While clearing the west quarter for more cropland, the Cat quarried a porcelain doorknob oystered in earth, grained and crazed like an historic egg, with a screwless stem of rusted and pitted iron. I turn its cold white roundness with my palm and open the oak door fitted with oval glass, fretted with wood ivy, and call my frontier neighbor. Her voice comes distant but clear, scolding children in overalls and highbutton shoes. A bucket of fresh eggs and a clutch of rhubarb rest on her daisied oil-cloth. She knew I would knock someday, wanting in.