Barbara Tomash
Homestead
Would you like the tea that tastes like grass? she asks. Do
you want the allspice sandwich? The coats on the rack are
without shoulders, the women in the chairs are without feet,
the floorboards extend the length of the room, but do not
meet the walls. Through translucent curtains trees are seen
to sway. I can’t be sure how to catalog these references:
Umbria (umbrella), grass (grazie), hospitable (pitiable), cat
(catenation). Pool of light bulb light. In the exposed and
open house, in the exposed and open hour: a painted wooden
mask; a painting of a face that looks like a mask; a map of the
world that masks the hole in the wall; a sculpture of a goddess
whose face is not mask so much as climate. Tell me a
table is not a dwelling place (plateau). Tell me a woman at
rest is not an ivy-covered wall (odalisque). Tell me why one
chair is empty—the chair that holds its arms out to us like a
grandmother. Books on shelves alert in their rants. I mean
ranks. We want to shake loose. So we bind ourselves in anticipation
of tremor. These tea cups, she says, will not withstand
another sweltering.
•
There is an opening from one room to the next, and we walk
between the two without thinking, we cross the boundary
between living and dining, as if the map on the wall were not
allegory, but tracery, lace we have knotted.