Photo from Boston Public Library
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In Quarantine
Don Edward Walicek The ancestors come down the hallway as if every evening were a family gathering. Devotion to calendars defined by work and ancient religions has kept them lonely and quiet in crowded cemeteries, locked out by fading cut-out obituaries, forgotten in frames high on the living room shelf that they dreamed of as a future altar. Common sense restricts our knowing, our comfort, memory, laughter and affinity, to annual pauses, and fosters this insistence that all the steady creaking, sounds loud and animate that wake me at night, must be moisture, just nothing trapped beneath the hardwood floor. Their footsteps coat me in this long interruption with comfort and precious company. The voices of my great aunts fade with the pills, but last night they convinced me to try on my good shoes, to pack a suitcase. Inside it I see familiar-looking infants, two or three unknown sisters awaiting the journey home. |