TILT

Sloan and Jenny bought a house back in St. Louis. They're moving at the end of July.

Last weekend there was an open house at our apartment, so we had to clean up a little. Going through stacks of papers, I found this poem--Rooms, by Kathleen Jamie. Elizabeth sent it to me a couple of summers ago, when she was caretaking a cabin in Idaho. It was labeled: Your predictable poem of the day.


We have not been sleeping well. The days are long now, and I love this, but it also makes me restless and I have often been thinking of other summers. Summers at camp, waking in the grass when the sun rose over the Continental Divide at the end of the valley. All summer the grass grew longer around me. In June, the grass was frosted. In August, it was golden, and seeded. When I got up in the morning, and rolled up my sleeping bag, the grass was pressed flat where I had slept. It always made me think of deer, that it was as if deer had slept there.

The summer two years ago when Ross and I moved here and lived in the cottage. The attic rooms. The big kitchen. The calla lilies blooming in the backyard. The tide was low at Carkeek Park, less than a mile away. We found the path and the park by chance. The path was muddy. Blackberries surprised us and scratched our ankles. The train rolled along the edge of the Puget Sound. There were signs posted warning us not to eat any seafood that we found. It was not safe. It was right there—the sand, the salt water, the Sound, the Ocean. I could not quite picture where we were on a map. We knew that it would take time for the city to feel like home. We agreed that the first year anywhere was hard, and that it took two years to fall into rhythm, to build anything like a life, to like it, but still, that summer we were surprised how difficult it was to find jobs, to make a life. And now I am leaving. Another year of newness. Two years.

In the morning the light comes through the leaves and through the curtains. It comes in early, bluish-gray, quiet.