The Man Who First Lived in This House.

Moran, Daniel Thomas

The Man Who First Lived in This House

   The man who first
   lived in this house
   painted the shingles red.
   He left a steel pulley
   over a rafter in the garage
   on which he hung
   his old outboard motors.
   In the corner of the footing
   he used a stick to mark 1964
   in the wet concrete. After that,
   I'll bet his car never suffered
   another night in the rain.
   There was a horseshoe
   nailed over the back door
   which I don't dare remove.

   But there was never a horse,
   just three cats, who
   lived long lives or did not,
   whom he buried beneath
   a marker of one by two pine,
   their tiny names washed away
   by many years of rainy days.
   Whatever remains of them
   shares the corner of the yard
   with an old hand pump, its
   one arm frozen forever in rust,
   which has not expressed
   a drop of water in decades.

   There was a woman, too, but
   a woman I don't care to talk about.
   She had many acquaintances
   but no friends, and a crazy son who
   either ran away or was chased..
   The best to be said of her was that
   she swam in the bay right through November,
   and that she collected scraps of meat
   to feed the sad cats at the dump.
   But she was hard and nasty as something
   you might stub a toe against in the dark.
   Sometimes people like that
   can live forever, and she almost did.
   Their husbands often die young,
   of passing the hours in the garage
   piecing together old boat motors and
   thinking of bluefish and little neck clams.

   The woman who lives here with me now,
   does not swim or search for scraps.
   I am often found sitting in this chair
   wondering what cats think about,
   tucked into a window sill watching
   brown leaves failing on the grass
   and deer wandering among the trees
   like there was no place more special to be.

   I have tried my best to stay out of boats
   and to love the secret of the waters
   from a dry purchase on the shore.
   Near the hanging steel pulley
   there is a work bench he left behind,
   where he made crucifixes for cats and
   attempted to fix all the broken things.
   I too have work to be done but not there.
   I only need a stylus and a sheaf like this one
   and the desire to see the world through
   the eyes of a cat or a man with a steel pulley.