Yankee Oriental

The Boston store-bought Oriental,      pride of spaniels in Grandmother's Cohasset parlor,lay twenty years or more beneath the family      dining table, above the stunted harbor

we viewed through attic windows,      the rotted half-moons of our childhood.The graces stuttered and her plates unwashed,      the silver unpolished on mahogany would

give that bay-windowed room its scent      and mystery. The ancient oaks beyondone by one became butchered stumps.      The weeping basement iced over like a pond.

The carpet, when the house was sold, reached sanctuary,      abandoned to our attic's dust-moted murk,wrapped tightly as a Tootsie Roll      while the moths did their mothy work.

Twenty years passed. Resurrected,      the brute dyes still maroon and verdigris,the ruin crackled on the auctioneer's shoulder.      Dogs, he spat. They love to piss in the same damn place.      Not much different from the human race.