letter to my home of seventeen years

What did you see when I left
you without a second glance?
It wasn’t that I didn’t want
to scour your every corner

and record each dust bunny and wall-crack
to memory; it was that I couldn’t
without crumbling the way you have, now,
not in form, but in spirit.

It was fitting, in a way: how I slammed
your front door on my way out
for the last time, unaware that that’s what it was.
It was just like it had always been,

from four to twenty-one. All the time
it was that sound, that same clunk-thump.
Is that the last thing you heard before disaster
banged in? It plays

in my mind, an incessant ringing
of the only life I can remember, the only place
I ever knew to call home.
And I know it’s foolish to miss you

like I miss deceased family,
but that is the role you played.
I left behind our furniture—your beloved guts, sold
off with a signature. You went from my place

of happiest memories to a homicide crime scene
of strangers who tried to love you
quicker than I knew how to cope
with even the move, let alone the loss.

I think of what I owe you:
a funeral, maybe, for surely you died
along with the bodies bleeding out
in the foyer of your right ventricle.

I should, at least, return
to you with an offering: a way to thank you
for your constancy, your silent protection
and companionship. I left you

without closure because I am a coward,
unable to say goodbye. I can’t rejoin
you for the same reason. I picture myself
kneeling on your concrete outside,

unable to ever step into you, again. I sit prostrate
on your grass, back against your stucco walls.
I see you, ever-staunch watcher, now broken
and alone in the mid-afternoon sunshine. The oak

shades your face and leaves dappled light rippling
around the lawn but there is no one to enjoy it,
no one left to love you.
No one left.

so you don’t have to

watching the water rise