The House on Magee

What is the first or second place you remember living? Think back to a place you lived when you were three, four, five years old–even if you lived there until you were much older. What are the earliest memories you have of that place? The house my family lived in on Magee Avenue wasn’t the first place I remember living–it was the third–but even so the earliest memories have a ghostly, fading-in-and-out quality to them.

We moved into the house when I was three. The story goes that my parents decided to sell the house we had lived in, and it sold much faster than expected, and the closing was going to be very quick–and suddenly my parents were looking for a house to buy in order to avoid moving someplace temporarily. The house on Magee was for sale, just came on the market after its owner had passed away, and Mom wrote a check to hold our chance to offer on the house before even seeing it.

Which, as I type this, sounds a little crazy to me.

But the three-story house was walking distance to work for my father. This was a time when one car per family was the norm, remember. (I can hear all the younger-than-millennials doing the math now and coming up with the conclusion that I am old!)  It was in a decent neighborhood in Rochester, NY, near decent public schools, and more than big enough for the family my parents were starting–my brother would come along at Christmas, he’s a Christmas Day baby.

And the house was priced right. The owners–the bank–wanted to sell quickly, since the prior owner, a Mr. Johnson, has recently passed. If a similar situation occurred today the bank would no doubt be a little more savvy about how to manage the property to get the best value from it. Then? They just wanted to unload it at whatever price seemed reasonable.

Unload it they did. My parent bought the house and moved in with less than two weeks from offer to close to move.

They bought the house and everything in it: furniture, clothing, jewelry, everything. Right down to the butter in the butter dish on the kitchen table and the empty hospital bed in the dining room, where Mr. Johnson had passed away.

Which would be a good start to a ghost story, right? Maybe I will get around to that, sometime. But for now, just some of the earliest images:

The House on Magee

Words left unused: deep dish pie plate,
potholder, bird of paradise, woodland mural.
The myth and pursuit of self-sufficiency.
Spray cleaner, roadrunner, roommate, sweet tea.
Broken temples of broken eyeglasses,
focus partial, starred, incomplete.
Cloth cut, not sewn. Half-done, half-immortal.
All these smothered by other words
that want their way, that clamor
window-side of the kissing gouramis.
Silver-pink scales. Protrusible
lips limned with horn-like teeth.
Meagerness slips through cracks.
Cherry tobacco smoke occludes the foreground.
Chipped saucers decompose
into glass, clay and smaller
subservient fragments, part star,
part unconsummated hope.
Filigree rings. Butter,
patient, spoils in its serving dish.

If you enjoyed The House on Magee

You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.  Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.  

And, comments welcome, as always–have a great week, and look for another poem next Monday.