On Working in My Son’s Room After He Has Moved Out

What does it mean that the only art you’d allow in your room is a tiny painting that blends with the blue walls, a portal through which to see two silver-haloed planets and a droplet of a moon in a star-splattered, velvety sky? They are not like earth, nor unlike earth exactly, just as the blue of this room is nothing like and very like a certain kind of sky. It’s not, I don’t think, that you dislike art in general, but you don’t like to be pinned to a single idea. There’s a book of logic puzzles on the shelf we always used to wonder at. Planets are to identity as paint is to fish. No. Space is to color as the roses blooming outside your window are to the tiny eye of a praying mantis. No? I always use wrapping paper printed with stars for your gifts. I’ve given you cards that unfold to reveal a three-dimensional paper ship, a bedspread that looks like an unmown field. That is to say, I have wanted to give you the world, but since it has never been mine to give I bought you a small portrait of imaginary planets someone else’s child painted, and hung it on your blue walls, which were not the neon green you said you wanted, but this other color, different than either of us would have chosen, but beautiful, it turns out, in all the kinds of light we have here in this little room on earth.

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Halloween snowstorm, Minneapolis, 1991

I remember that I didn’t know my neighbors
except the man across the hall with a kitten
he let wander our hallway. On the morning D called
at dawn muttering nonsense about angels and windows
I saw the city buried in snow, white sky, white mounds,
the streets whited out and everything as still
as a held breath. The kitten man and I went from floor
to floor and at every door asked what was needed
then took a wagon that someone had and struggled
into the new white-out world where everyone lived
now to help another. We worked in pairs and coteries
to dig out cars from beneath snowbanks, to carve paths
wide enough for one person to pass
between piles which were already starting to lose their brilliant shine,
we sculpted streets where memory said streets should be,
took turns following the shovelers with bags of sand
and cannisters of coarse salt. We took turns shoveling,
throwing the heavy stuff into mounds
that fattened and grew and sweated and froze slick again.
We dragged the wagon a few blocks that took all morning
to a store that was somehow open and bought whatever we could find
that was anything like what our neighbors wanted
and heaved the wagon back another hour along our own furrows
and up the mountain where the front steps used to be
and knocked again at all the doors on all the floors
to hand out all the not-quite-what-was-asked-for sundries
and went to our own doors exhausted, as happy
as I had ever been.

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Rebecca Aronson is the author of three books of poetry, Anchor, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, and Creature, Creature. She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, a Yetzirah poetry fellowship, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee writers conference. She is host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music. She lives in Albuquerque, where she teaches writing. Her website is rebeccaaronsonpoetry.com