Are You Still Happy with Your Home?

by Medrie Purdham

 

for our realtor, who regularly asks

She taught us once what soffits were; she keeps in touch.

Sends us each a card on the other’s birthday, gives us

things to plant: supermoon pumpkin, midnight snack tomato.

Ices her own photorealistic likeness onto sugar cookies,

probes our existential state.  Annually, we consume her

in effigy, with mulled wine and hesitation. 

No, forms my reply. We can’t be happy, the house has failed. 

We dismantled our child’s alchemy lab and now

it seems it never was: no curio bottles, cuttings

or barks, unguents. There’s nothing brewing inside

anything anyone ever called an alembic, there’s no perplexity over

untransmuted things. Where have the essences gone,

I never ask. When she measured the backyard, it was not

to assess the space we’d have for running around

in costume: cotton batting and linen pants. We never enacted

the 1912 cyclone, never pretended to bash the windows

out of the legislature. Never shrieked for joy.

We had green space and, in time, were supposed to turn it

into ourselves, full bloom, that’s all. But the small

rituals these grounds hosted were indebted human goods.

We lulled ourselves to sleep with minor stories. In the hatchery

that’s gone, no eggs were moved by their own internal radiance

to draconic self-revelation.  No dragon pets!

No morning where a child believed the cat said rock and roll

or posed pregnancy questions. Did you call yourself I or we? 

The robot whose job it is to make paper clips would eventually turn

all matter into a paper clip factory, or so I read.

Were we right to overturn our piece of earth and will we therefore

bury ourselves eventually? In the beginning, she said the snow

deepening on our roof was good, it was a sign. It showed

how much of our energy we’d keep, how much we’d lose.