Paul Smart Traducción: Iván Soto Camba Refuge

REFUGE

Carlights slice door leakage. Linoleum patterns a myriad map.

Dark loam beneath; squiggly lives within.

Stone steps amid the catpiss stench from overgrown boxwoods. Slab ladder treehouse; batter’s box painted on a clapboard garage’s peeling wall.

The start of no as a breeze rustles tall grass in a fallow lawn. Puncture bites.

Old snapshots curled in on themselves. Cracks in oil. Stuff which travels as family: Apple crate bookcases. Circular table with hideaways. Brass bed. Rocker. Wood salad bowl set with faux-African figurehead fork and spoon. Lidded penguin ice bowl, fancy. Antique barber’s chair.

All gone with parents, grandparents. We pack now on budgets: of time and space, sentiment and the horizon.

Refuge during and after pandemic.

Stripping wall-to-wall from an expanded one room school house; stripping wallpaper from a multi-porched three story. Finding feverish comfort in a cool tall-ceilinged room, Debussy played low. Piles of clothes. Gone.

What travels beyond memory? Darkroom materials. An old laptop loaded with Pagemaker. The piano and its roundabout story. Art and carpets, a couple of fine chairs, side tables. The bed.

We made homes from houses. Found objects, hand-me-downs. An evolving sense of taste.

Refuge shifts. It’s behind the eyes. In sleep. Recognition. Still surprises.

Unstill memory stripped of recalcitrance, voided of fear.

—Paul Smart