Ours was the blue house on Donnelly.

We weren’t the kind for cucumber & dill.

It was takeout, with Ann’s hours, or fish sticks.

We tried to be good, responsible married folk,

but more nights than not I would

drive home the crinkly bag from Joy Luck

and salivate through the yellow lights

to the blue house with lawn lamps in the falling dark,

banked on either side with yellow buds—

forsythia, from owners prior. Ann loved them 

but neglected them,

and still they came back first and brightest, 

end of March.

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Among our reasons for the move was school,

but then we hadn’t kids to send. Ann, I think, had 

regrets. But then I’d whisk her up to see the foliage

and sleep in twin beds with woolly quilts and timber frames.

We found a poem book, once, in the nightstand and 

frowned over the lines until we laughed.

Autumn followed us back from Willoughby and then they 

dropped, the forsythia, and left behind a wall of reddish leaves.

Responsible red, like curtains on a set, their closure looming.

We’d pick up milk and try to recreate 

the waffles. When that failed, the poetry.

---

The branches bared. English muffins. Snow.

Christmas bears from Michigan and mugs

of cocoa topped with ginger. Ann’s idea, different.

Her mother liked peeled potatoes for New Years

and stepping stones in the garden, gone in snow,

the banks on either side like muttonchops

as winter lopped the heads off our forsythia.

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The chimney sweet with cedar and old headlines,

and cold again as pond and railroad thawed,

Ann and I spent twenty years on Donnelly

in sweet smoke and summer fog,

with water damage and widened doors.

The study made a fine bedroom,

and afternoons while Ann would sleep,

and I kept watch from couch and coffee table,

I would trace our movements, stove to den,

thousands repetitions back and forth, and 

not once had we thought we’d slow and settle

like cardinals in the frost

until we froze.

---

That last winter, when Annie passed,

and I could smell her still in coats and shoes,

I traced us one last time, rice and rangoons,

and washed the boxes in the kitchen sink,

myself a shallow shape in the night window,

and keyed my wrists and dyed the basin reckless

as Ann kept watch and waited in the past.

---

It opens wide and lets us back in death,

so young and timeless we might always have

this place, that otherwise would crumble, fall, exist

only in perishable photographs and sleep.

Stone by stone we make our way,

between the lawn lamps burning golden eggs,

forsythia and chimney cool but sweet-black,

to the blue house that we loved and left in fog.