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IN THE HOUSE OF THE CHILD If you hear the chatter of water beneath the ice-capped stream, if you hear the creaking oak lightning took away, it's because nothing's been discarded here, though the cabinets have been emptied out, and the closet's scent is purely cedar. Long after a son's renounced his mother's dream of him, long after he's settled in the city with her duplicate or opposite, he comes back to mother her, to memorize a sight, to clear a place. Spoons click in their tray. The table must be set. A candle's lit for dinner. The trail of light from then to now is snow the storm condenses on the window sill. The house remembered gives no shelter from the winter. But it seems to me there's too much light at four a.m. Too much frost. Too much of her when her nightgown with its crown of lace flutters on the frozen clothesline, when furniture's shifted from the fireplace to suggest sufficient warmth and space. I never think of her. Never, or almost never, and always when I first wake up, when the bedroom door's ajar.