On moving day

On moving day, the last few straggling pieces
gathered in the last of a hundred boxes,
the final check complete, a last still moment
is captured as the van doors close.
I stand with back to the sink, pocketing
memories that refuse to stay behind.
Although the table where she drank is gone,
the back-lit dust motes crackle
with our energy, not quite spent
these four years on, but now free-floating.
The sharper incidents, suffused with time,
cling in soft focus round our departure.

Three weeks on, my son and I go past the house.
Our doors and windows stacked against the wall,
the bathroom open to the world,
and mounds of plaster barricade the front,
crushing the tulips and the flowering shrubs—
the place that we called home reduced
to bricks and mortar. The best response,
a shrug, does not resolve uneasy hearts.
The crumbled fragments of a family's life,
the screams that rise up from the rubble,
pursue us up the road and into Jacob's dreams
from which he wakes and sobs at midnight.