A Room in the Past

It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill with a morning light so bright you can’t see beyond its windows into the afternoon. A kitchen falling through time with its things in their places, the dishes jingling up in the cupboard, the bucket of drinking water rippled as if a truck had just gone past, but that truck was thirty years. No one’s at home in this room. Its counter is wiped, and the dishrag hangs from its nail, a dry leaf. In housedresses of mist, blue aprons of rain, my grandmother moved through this life like a ghost, and when she had finished her years, she put them all back in their places and wiped out the sink, turning her back on the rest of us, forever.