1878 Brown Street

1878 BROWN STREET


The garden in the mind is extension. The
mysterious absence of definition in the distance
between the blue hydrangea and the pussy willow
by the alley picket fence is explained today:
the yard was very small. It was not the forty or
so vague pretty green feet to the fence, but maybe
fifteen. The corner of the garage almost reached
the hydrangea, just a narrow cement path I now
remember. The garage is designed for the stubby
cars of 1928. Everything is small. So the remembered
vista is enlarged by absence alone – nothing added
(memory was at least that honest) except distance.
The actual remembered particulars are stretched out
to cover an imagined extent. Or: not imagined.
Remembered with a child’s distance. Walking the few
steps from the alleyway to the stores on the other
side of Avenue S, past Haring Street, I recall what
a significant walk that seemed to me when I lived there.
So the garden too had a child’s legs to measure it,
far, far, from the little patch of grass around the
hydrangea, I can feel it in my fingers, to the gaunt
picket fence. In fact there is nothing there. Some
later owner tore all the ivy down and replaced the
old burgundy brick with a parti-colored imitation
fieldstone. Rooted up the deep red roses by the Mulhare’s
wall and the pussy willow and the blue hydrangea that
all summer was the center of my world. Paved the whole
thing over with cement. Patio. Empty now, dirty cement,
late winter on earth. Desolate. So it’s a bare thirty
feet now from the shabby iron fence at the alleyway
and the shabby back wall of the house, where a porch
or platform hangs off the second story, and a narrow
staircase leads up to it. My parents’ bedroom. And the
window of my little room is still a window, but one of
my parents’ windows is a door now, the way onto the porch.
But the downstairs window of the bathroom is still a
window, and it looks as if it is the same old pebbled glass!
The light is on in the bathroom though it’s early afternoon,
the light is yellowish in the rainy light of the day.
No one answers the door when I knock, but an expensive
little dog barks steadily, and noses apart the vertical
blind that shield the window of what was once my living room,
where I am stretched out in a green tapestry armchair with
a green ottoman, I am reading Stevenson and eating Christmas
mints sixty years ago. The dog barks, it knows a ghost is
in the room, a ghost at the window, a ghost at the door.
The dog barks and no one comes, and we go away. What could
I have said? No hydrangea flowers in the no blue Chinese
vase on the no black lacquered table in the window. No
explanation. Memory too is a terrible country where there
is no explanation.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005