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 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.”