Weekly Poem: 'Living Room'

**By Andrea Hollander Budy** In the cave of memory my father crawls now, his small carbide light fixed to his forehead, his kneepads so worn from the journey they're barely useful, but he adjusts them again and again. Sometimes he arches up, stands, reaches, measures himself against the wayward height of the ceiling, which in this part of the cave is at best uneven. He often hits his head. Other times he suddenly stoops, winces, calls out a name, sometimes the pet name he had for my long-dead mother or the name he called his own. That's when my stepmother tries to call him back. _Honeyman_, she says, one hand on his cheek, the other his shoulder, settling him into the one chair he sometimes stays in. There are days she discovers him curled beneath the baby grand, and she's learned to lie down with him. _I am here_, she says, her body caved against this man who every day deserts her. _Bats_, he says, or maybe, _field glasses_. Perhaps he's back in France, 1944, she doesn't know. But soon he's up again on his knees, shushing her, checking his headlamp, adjusting his kneepads, and she rises to her own knees, she doesn't know what else to do, the two of them explorers, one whose thinning pin of light leads them, making their slow way through this room named for the living.   "Andrea Hollander Budy":http://www.andreahollanderbudy.com/index.htm is the author of three poetry collections: "Woman in the Painting," "The Other Life" and "House Without a Dreamer," which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Other honors include the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, the Runes Poetry Award and poetry fellowships the National Endowment for the Arts. She is also the editor of "When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women."