Visitation
When
I knock on Ruth’s back door,
a
November afternoon, the pecans
all fallen from their trees,
she holds out her shrunken arms to me,
arthritic fingers at the land’s end
of
her hands, and I think
how long she has held on to this life.
Of
late, others have begun to stop in.
Howard
was just here, she says,
and Lizbeth, her brother and sister
who arrive without knocking.
Lois
and Michael visit often,
and good news — he’s out of that horrid
mental hospital they kept him in
the last years of his life. And
Kate,
whom she fed and bathed —
that chair in the corner
of
the sun porch is hers,
where she watches the birds.
In
all the rooms of the house
they are waiting,
grainy as slanted light,
opening the musty books
on
the shelves, lifting
the calendar’s pages
to
check the unmarked date
when Ruth will become as light
as
they.
Pamela Porter’s
poems have appeared in