The staircase didn’t seem to loom before,
not from my periphery
while I padded past its foot,
left for later the second-story
search as bookcases, binders,
loosed leaves led
like river pebbles dotting
pappy moss from the forest’s fringe
to the clearing
and the cauldron
at its heart.
The attic and its ember-ring I knew
better than to break into.
But after I hear her wish
only to sleep, to wait among the rafters,
I remember your last message played
back from the black two-tape machine,
heralded by red-disc strobe
warning like a lighthouse
from the upper oak ledge
of my dorm room desk,
a record so long its end never vanished
under crests of study dates and walks to lunch
and the pall of a bare “Call home.”
The spooling poles relayed
a dwindling account
of all your fight ebbing out
in a sanctuary lit mostly by prayer,
ending with a finality of “insurmountable,”
and so I wish my arrow might fly faster,
to sprint up the foreboding stairs and wind
my way to the red-shift attic,
green-track fervor and yellow-page dread
propelling pedal and pulse and a longing
to be in time this time.
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