Rodney Jones, "The Previous Tenants"
The Previous Tenants
1
The couple who built our house had great plans
for this lot where they would live out their days:
he in dedicated husbandry, priming a garden
with sludge from the sewage plant, hauling stones
from the condemned homesteads by the new lake
to buttress the terraces; and she reading Aquinas
or pouring Pinot noir for predinner conversations
after her work as a counselor at the women’s center.
She had returned to shcool late, a fourth degree,
and a meaningful career after years of jobs
for little pay or credit, the fate of a faculty wife.
She had a gift for empathy, a true calling,
said a fellow counselor at her memorial.
And then the younger son stood and agreed that, yes,
she was a fine counselor, but a terrible mother.
“She was not there fore us when we failed.
She only loved our successes.” Cicadas,
then October’s first cold night, the instant
stuck there like an arrow singing in a wall.
2
Until then we had foolishly thought them happy:
he an accomplished man, a graduate of Penn;
and she a woman of privilege and beauty,
tall and regal with aquiline nose and blue eyes.
On the few occasions I saw them together,
she made him, by comparison, seem dull.
Later, after he died, I would see her sometimes
at retirement dinners, and we would talk.
She liked to tell of meeting Franklin Roosevelt —
just that once, but she remembered,
she said, how he threw his head back like a horse,
and laughed — “a high horse-laugh,”
she described it each time, though the joke,
which I only dimly recall, was on her.
She seemed pleased that we got the house.
3
It would suit us fine if there were a bathroom
guests could use without first going through a bedroom.
The big room upstairs, open and high-ceilinged,
a luxury after the cedar frame and plain brown door,
as though the modest exterior held a larger interior.
The screen porch, the south-facing windows
that let in light’s various shades of romantic contentment;
neighborly amenities, houses set back from the street,
three-acre lots, trees and flowers, and always the deer
materializing out of the maples and walnuts
that curtain us from each other and grant solitude
until November when the leaves fall.
The walkers happening by, sometimes a barred owl,
or an eagle, or one of the hawks that nest in the woods by the lake.
George, a friend of theirs, asked for clippings of columbine
planted along the drive, and when
we could not find them, he insisted,
so we looked again, but found nothing.
What we know is a garden and a calendar:
daffodils at winter’s end, then forsythia, azaleas,
purple irises half a week before yellow, and each year,
on the seventh of May, peonies, of a lustrous salmon,
like cones of sherbet at the back of the lawn.
4
He forgot the names of the irises, but the ego did not diminish.
He forgot the trowel under the azalea, bu the ego did not diminish.
He forgot the azalea. Others and then himself he forgot.
The byzantine roads to town and the apple tree he forgot,
the dogwood and the cherry, and his key to Jerusalem,
but the ego did not diminish. Often it seemed to him
he was here, he looked into the goldfish pond and saw
himself, but it was the wrong year, the pond was gone.
It was cold and hot at once, the hours ran together,
and he wanted Mother, but the ego did not diminish.
He thought toward names almost here, tools and angels.
He pruned the forsythia’s wilderness of rain shoots.
He rode into town for grass shears, but at the corner
of Sycamore and Oakland, turned right instead of left,
and then, after a block, left, and began to drive in a dream
of a bay, past the topiary hedges and manicured lawns
in the neighborhood of his childhood and knew
it was not a dream and parked in the shade and waited
until the officer came, but the ego did not diminish.
He forgot his Blake, his “Little lamb, who made thee?”
And “I see all things, past, present and future.”
He forgot the gold of his wife’s skin illumined.
The ego did not diminish, but the skull rose,
and the garden came to her, a displaced city girl.
She saw beauty in work and gratitude in mourning.
She rubbed her hands together and looked at the sky.
The dragon horticulture squatted on her back.
5
How do you know you are old?
Lung ache. Arrythmia. Temporary
aphasias. The tap left dripping —
second, hour, day, week, month,
Vicodin, Vytorin, Crestor —
rhythms of looking and forgetting:
the instant in sprint
when the sun overcomes
the effects of the wind
and the instant in fall
when the wind overcomes
the effects of the sun — one year
would be a good way to see it
if you could see a year.
“The first year of marriage,”
Borden Plunkett’s uncle told him,
“each time you make love,
place a penny in a jar.
The second year,
begin taking them out.
When the jar is empty,
you will be old.”
6
Most of us who live here do not come from here
and seem to be somewhere else when we talk
and would not know a hackberry from a cottonwood
though we post e-lerts for copperhead sightings
and eschew Dursban and Diazinon, which explains
the surfeit of moles and brown recluse spiders.
“How do you like it there?” friends often ask,
and it always surprises, I think of it so little,
only occasionally when I walk, that some places
are better, others worse: vague thoughts
with a negotiable distance between them, the way towns
cropped up east of the Mississippi every six miles,
the time it took by horse and wagon to some and trade
and get back with light to milk and feed the stock.
So many histories, hoofed and creeping beneath the wheel.
The Shawnee, then the French, then the English.
Peach orchards west of us, mariachi from the trailers,
and under us the black übershelf of anthracite,
fallow since the late-seventies EPA restrictions.
Miners out of work, meth freaks, holy rollers.
And our suburb like a little blue island in a red sea;
philosophers and psychologists, a mathematician from Cameroon,
an Algerian theorist, three attorneys, a Belsen survivor
with her wristlet of numbers — realtor, sculptor,
photographer, car salesman, anesthesiologist.
Fundamentalists, freethinkers, Muslims, Jews.
The dreamed peace a little money makes possible. Bells
of the ice cream truck. Wild turkeys in the yard.
Fiction, said Forster, is what others think we are.
7
We know them from the colors they left more than their words.
We know them more from the marks they left on the wood
than the pulses that quickened when they entered rooms.
We know the four flower beds. We do not know their love.
We know all that went unrepaired and fell apart.
We know them from others more than they told us themselves.
From all that he left unfinished, we know how he began not to know.
We know from the ripped-out risers of the stairwell,
from the basement clothesline and boxes of bolts and screws.
From instruction manuals and extension cords, we know.
From sprung traps and expired poisons, from loose wire.
How small the distance to our neighbors across history.
We tell their time by the birdfeeder rotting on its post.
From the oak log in the gully, we know their shade.
From things that work and things that no longer work.
From lapsed warranties, from fire alarms in every room.
From the nail the Sheetrock still grips, the stove’s vortical eyes.
From plastic that each winter sealed in the screen port.
From a light wheelbarrow, a bulb planter, a rusty awl.
From the foundation crack, we know their charity for the cedar.
What we do not know and what they know will be one thing.
It hooks and trims us. It weighs us in the blackbird’s flight.
8
Going back a year, and another year,
I am recovering from rotator-cuff surgery.
I have a ball, with which I am instructed
to roll letters onto a door. I have decided
during this time, because I neglected it
as a child, to learn the alphabet backward.
Some of the sequence is hard to remember.
I keep stopping at S and J. The blocks
are not plaque, I think. These oubliettes
in the backward alphabet stopped me in 1955.
Some of the letters hurt. X is electric,
a hard, tingling jolt. W is unforgiveable.
The son’s story bothers me because it is not nice.
I was raised not to say things that give offense,
a cultivated mind, a garden of beautiful words
like A Child’s Garden of Verses on the shelf;
and, under the euphemisms, a paralysis
of cordialities, so for my sister and me
it was never possible to have it out.
As if the soul were better left private,
our mother pointed to the intractable God,
to be worshiped publicly, prayed to in silence.
The usual Protestant thought. With others
we were always wrong. Only in solitude could we be right.
9
Some things to pray to in the Shawnee Hills:
homesteads under Cedar Lake, the breath in soldiers’ graves,
the preemptory faith of the ill and alcoholics.
I think of another story from the wife’s memorial service.
She was angry with her husband when he died.
Piques. Rages. Petulances. All that wrongheadedness
the doctors had forbidden her to correct when he was alive.
A friend suggested that she write him a letter.
The letter of inanimate jealousy, the caregiver’s self-love.
In all, it took a little more than a month,
and then they spaded a hole and buried it under a rose.
We had meant to strip the place of their presence.
Downstairs we ripped out the acoustic tiles and put up carsiding.
Hardwood floors over the cement. We halved the large
room where guests slept: a bedroom for Alexis, and for me
a study with built-in bookshelves. A calm place to write.
Morning accompaniment of cardinals. But late at night
I think of exhuming that letter. Yesterday
when I stepped out to smoke, four deer were lying on the lawn
and I thought her words or his spirit had entered the deer.
10
When people die, you look for them beside you
and find them sometimes in the hawk’s eyes,
and then back, back, into the cloud, the shape of vanishing.
Something today in the in-box that does not apply,
that slipped the title-grabbers of the spam filters —
She didn’t know anything about the Einstein theory.
She loved to pore over the advertisement pictures in the magazines.
The bite and tang of the cold air seemed to increase her anger.
There were long pauses when she lay very still —
and yet applies nearly and completely by accident
so spirit in one of its digital avatars seems involved,
and voices rush in, other people’s and my own.
All day I hear them as I go about my chores.
We believe when a person dies, said Golda Meir, a world dies.
Silent genesis, fawn of the afterlife, articulate mist,
what do the ghosts say to dreams? Vagrant loneliness
of the inner stairway, transmission of liniment and salve,
language of original starlight that we unknowingly quote —
the thought nearest the doing works best. Measure,
then measure again, and the third nails it. I lay
new walkway over old path, place new boards in old fence.
When a new thought goes against an old one, deny neither.
The wood with its resins still speaks of the tree.
I find black slats in the screen porch where she sat
and little oblong holes of transparency like runs in stockings.
I fix things because they are here and in the distance.
With a utility knife, I score the wire and break it off,
cut new slats to length, paint them, and climb the ladder.
Rodney Jones
1
The couple who built our house had great plans
for this lot where they would live out their days:
he in dedicated husbandry, priming a garden
with sludge from the sewage plant, hauling stones
from the condemned homesteads by the new lake
to buttress the terraces; and she reading Aquinas
or pouring Pinot noir for predinner conversations
after her work as a counselor at the women’s center.
She had returned to shcool late, a fourth degree,
and a meaningful career after years of jobs
for little pay or credit, the fate of a faculty wife.
She had a gift for empathy, a true calling,
said a fellow counselor at her memorial.
And then the younger son stood and agreed that, yes,
she was a fine counselor, but a terrible mother.
“She was not there fore us when we failed.
She only loved our successes.” Cicadas,
then October’s first cold night, the instant
stuck there like an arrow singing in a wall.
2
Until then we had foolishly thought them happy:
he an accomplished man, a graduate of Penn;
and she a woman of privilege and beauty,
tall and regal with aquiline nose and blue eyes.
On the few occasions I saw them together,
she made him, by comparison, seem dull.
Later, after he died, I would see her sometimes
at retirement dinners, and we would talk.
She liked to tell of meeting Franklin Roosevelt —
just that once, but she remembered,
she said, how he threw his head back like a horse,
and laughed — “a high horse-laugh,”
she described it each time, though the joke,
which I only dimly recall, was on her.
She seemed pleased that we got the house.
3
It would suit us fine if there were a bathroom
guests could use without first going through a bedroom.
The big room upstairs, open and high-ceilinged,
a luxury after the cedar frame and plain brown door,
as though the modest exterior held a larger interior.
The screen porch, the south-facing windows
that let in light’s various shades of romantic contentment;
neighborly amenities, houses set back from the street,
three-acre lots, trees and flowers, and always the deer
materializing out of the maples and walnuts
that curtain us from each other and grant solitude
until November when the leaves fall.
The walkers happening by, sometimes a barred owl,
or an eagle, or one of the hawks that nest in the woods by the lake.
George, a friend of theirs, asked for clippings of columbine
planted along the drive, and when
we could not find them, he insisted,
so we looked again, but found nothing.
What we know is a garden and a calendar:
daffodils at winter’s end, then forsythia, azaleas,
purple irises half a week before yellow, and each year,
on the seventh of May, peonies, of a lustrous salmon,
like cones of sherbet at the back of the lawn.
4
He forgot the names of the irises, but the ego did not diminish.
He forgot the trowel under the azalea, bu the ego did not diminish.
He forgot the azalea. Others and then himself he forgot.
The byzantine roads to town and the apple tree he forgot,
the dogwood and the cherry, and his key to Jerusalem,
but the ego did not diminish. Often it seemed to him
he was here, he looked into the goldfish pond and saw
himself, but it was the wrong year, the pond was gone.
It was cold and hot at once, the hours ran together,
and he wanted Mother, but the ego did not diminish.
He thought toward names almost here, tools and angels.
He pruned the forsythia’s wilderness of rain shoots.
He rode into town for grass shears, but at the corner
of Sycamore and Oakland, turned right instead of left,
and then, after a block, left, and began to drive in a dream
of a bay, past the topiary hedges and manicured lawns
in the neighborhood of his childhood and knew
it was not a dream and parked in the shade and waited
until the officer came, but the ego did not diminish.
He forgot his Blake, his “Little lamb, who made thee?”
And “I see all things, past, present and future.”
He forgot the gold of his wife’s skin illumined.
The ego did not diminish, but the skull rose,
and the garden came to her, a displaced city girl.
She saw beauty in work and gratitude in mourning.
She rubbed her hands together and looked at the sky.
The dragon horticulture squatted on her back.
5
How do you know you are old?
Lung ache. Arrythmia. Temporary
aphasias. The tap left dripping —
second, hour, day, week, month,
Vicodin, Vytorin, Crestor —
rhythms of looking and forgetting:
the instant in sprint
when the sun overcomes
the effects of the wind
and the instant in fall
when the wind overcomes
the effects of the sun — one year
would be a good way to see it
if you could see a year.
“The first year of marriage,”
Borden Plunkett’s uncle told him,
“each time you make love,
place a penny in a jar.
The second year,
begin taking them out.
When the jar is empty,
you will be old.”
6
Most of us who live here do not come from here
and seem to be somewhere else when we talk
and would not know a hackberry from a cottonwood
though we post e-lerts for copperhead sightings
and eschew Dursban and Diazinon, which explains
the surfeit of moles and brown recluse spiders.
“How do you like it there?” friends often ask,
and it always surprises, I think of it so little,
only occasionally when I walk, that some places
are better, others worse: vague thoughts
with a negotiable distance between them, the way towns
cropped up east of the Mississippi every six miles,
the time it took by horse and wagon to some and trade
and get back with light to milk and feed the stock.
So many histories, hoofed and creeping beneath the wheel.
The Shawnee, then the French, then the English.
Peach orchards west of us, mariachi from the trailers,
and under us the black übershelf of anthracite,
fallow since the late-seventies EPA restrictions.
Miners out of work, meth freaks, holy rollers.
And our suburb like a little blue island in a red sea;
philosophers and psychologists, a mathematician from Cameroon,
an Algerian theorist, three attorneys, a Belsen survivor
with her wristlet of numbers — realtor, sculptor,
photographer, car salesman, anesthesiologist.
Fundamentalists, freethinkers, Muslims, Jews.
The dreamed peace a little money makes possible. Bells
of the ice cream truck. Wild turkeys in the yard.
Fiction, said Forster, is what others think we are.
7
We know them from the colors they left more than their words.
We know them more from the marks they left on the wood
than the pulses that quickened when they entered rooms.
We know the four flower beds. We do not know their love.
We know all that went unrepaired and fell apart.
We know them from others more than they told us themselves.
From all that he left unfinished, we know how he began not to know.
We know from the ripped-out risers of the stairwell,
from the basement clothesline and boxes of bolts and screws.
From instruction manuals and extension cords, we know.
From sprung traps and expired poisons, from loose wire.
How small the distance to our neighbors across history.
We tell their time by the birdfeeder rotting on its post.
From the oak log in the gully, we know their shade.
From things that work and things that no longer work.
From lapsed warranties, from fire alarms in every room.
From the nail the Sheetrock still grips, the stove’s vortical eyes.
From plastic that each winter sealed in the screen port.
From a light wheelbarrow, a bulb planter, a rusty awl.
From the foundation crack, we know their charity for the cedar.
What we do not know and what they know will be one thing.
It hooks and trims us. It weighs us in the blackbird’s flight.
8
Going back a year, and another year,
I am recovering from rotator-cuff surgery.
I have a ball, with which I am instructed
to roll letters onto a door. I have decided
during this time, because I neglected it
as a child, to learn the alphabet backward.
Some of the sequence is hard to remember.
I keep stopping at S and J. The blocks
are not plaque, I think. These oubliettes
in the backward alphabet stopped me in 1955.
Some of the letters hurt. X is electric,
a hard, tingling jolt. W is unforgiveable.
The son’s story bothers me because it is not nice.
I was raised not to say things that give offense,
a cultivated mind, a garden of beautiful words
like A Child’s Garden of Verses on the shelf;
and, under the euphemisms, a paralysis
of cordialities, so for my sister and me
it was never possible to have it out.
As if the soul were better left private,
our mother pointed to the intractable God,
to be worshiped publicly, prayed to in silence.
The usual Protestant thought. With others
we were always wrong. Only in solitude could we be right.
9
Some things to pray to in the Shawnee Hills:
homesteads under Cedar Lake, the breath in soldiers’ graves,
the preemptory faith of the ill and alcoholics.
I think of another story from the wife’s memorial service.
She was angry with her husband when he died.
Piques. Rages. Petulances. All that wrongheadedness
the doctors had forbidden her to correct when he was alive.
A friend suggested that she write him a letter.
The letter of inanimate jealousy, the caregiver’s self-love.
In all, it took a little more than a month,
and then they spaded a hole and buried it under a rose.
We had meant to strip the place of their presence.
Downstairs we ripped out the acoustic tiles and put up carsiding.
Hardwood floors over the cement. We halved the large
room where guests slept: a bedroom for Alexis, and for me
a study with built-in bookshelves. A calm place to write.
Morning accompaniment of cardinals. But late at night
I think of exhuming that letter. Yesterday
when I stepped out to smoke, four deer were lying on the lawn
and I thought her words or his spirit had entered the deer.
10
When people die, you look for them beside you
and find them sometimes in the hawk’s eyes,
and then back, back, into the cloud, the shape of vanishing.
Something today in the in-box that does not apply,
that slipped the title-grabbers of the spam filters —
She didn’t know anything about the Einstein theory.
She loved to pore over the advertisement pictures in the magazines.
The bite and tang of the cold air seemed to increase her anger.
There were long pauses when she lay very still —
and yet applies nearly and completely by accident
so spirit in one of its digital avatars seems involved,
and voices rush in, other people’s and my own.
All day I hear them as I go about my chores.
We believe when a person dies, said Golda Meir, a world dies.
Silent genesis, fawn of the afterlife, articulate mist,
what do the ghosts say to dreams? Vagrant loneliness
of the inner stairway, transmission of liniment and salve,
language of original starlight that we unknowingly quote —
the thought nearest the doing works best. Measure,
then measure again, and the third nails it. I lay
new walkway over old path, place new boards in old fence.
When a new thought goes against an old one, deny neither.
The wood with its resins still speaks of the tree.
I find black slats in the screen porch where she sat
and little oblong holes of transparency like runs in stockings.
I fix things because they are here and in the distance.
With a utility knife, I score the wire and break it off,
cut new slats to length, paint them, and climb the ladder.
Rodney Jones
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