Up in the green room there's this wooden desk. It's filled with stationery for writing letters I never get around to. It reminds me how important learning is to me. For some reason I'm embarrassed to write how important the student aspect of my identity is. I broke up with my therapist in part because she never gave me assignments. This morning at my first acupuncture treatment, when Dr. Wang said, "Your homework is...," I know I lit up like a bulb.
There is a bed in almost every room of my house. I envision the house filled with people and my best times are when that vision is the reality. I hosted a poetry retreat the week after I bought it. My friends slept on air mattresses. Last summer they returned, to more beds (and record heat!) We bought plastic fans for the windows. Andrew filled a vase with ice water and placed it on a table in front of one of the fans to blow across him as he wrote. Swamp AC, he called it. I thought, this is what the house is for. My three best friends from college came--Kelli with her husband and kids in tow--and endured heat and humidity too. We drank mint juleps and groused. Kelli: Ok, it's 98 degrees in my kid's playpen!
I imagine the house filled to capacity: coming down to make breakfast, walking through the tv room past whoever's sleepy-eyed and bed-headed in the antique twin I bought from the Salvation Army. Pancakes with blueberry compote. Poached eggs over fresh greens.
And in the living room there's this wholly debauched lady in red:
Red Whorehouse Sofa
the furrowed wood of the red whorehouse sofa
I might find a splinter and fill my mouth
with the taste of blood and old dust
It curves scoliotic sags like a shoulder
I follow its lines a lumpy terrain the almost rust-grained
nap of velvet It hides rips held together
with safety pins like the worn gown
of an old woman who refuses mirrors
whose seam split a slit run too high
revealing pale varicose thigh
It keeps the smells of marrow the memory of fire
and dead wood I could strip it find it animal
a skeletal patchwork of horse-hair stuffed boards
its black iron lion’s paw feet screwed deep
into its splayed legs In my lust for texture
I am afraid to leave its broken lap
It offers a layered history of lives I slip
into like shadow familiar as family
I have built my living room around the beauty
of its battered curves the creak of its belly when I twist
or turn its bawdy sinking the thought of recovering it
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, "Red Whorehouse Sofa" from Black Swan (University of Pittsburgh Press) Copyright © 2002
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