Kathryn: Hidden

by Susan Settlemyre Williams

    1. The Cellar

Nobody remembers the cellar.  Nobody
after Mother wanted the work

of preserving.  Used to be jars
were gold and green inside, but gray

things live in them now.  Under the hatch
steps pitching down

in secret dark into dark and black smell of earth.
When I heard about the tomb

Lazarus was called out of, I thought
how you feel in the dark

for the light cord.  Mother up behind
with the flashlight, making jar-light, fingers

caught in sticky, Mother said cobwebs but
I thought old cloth.  I thought the corpse

reaching at me in its sheet.
The cellar was the only place.  Secret,

said the angel.  Be strong. Your Work is
not for other people’s eyes.

 

    2. Break-In

Two of them.  White.  Martha
wanted to know.  You sure? she asked.

They stood in the bedroom door.  Cut
on the light so I had to see them.
White.  The naked one.  I wanted

not to see.  Bag, they called me.  Other names
I will not remember.  Laughter
like a fire in the barn.  I couldn’t speak

not even to beg.  But it was
my pocketbook they ripped open,
a pantsuit in the wardrobe.

My spending money,
Mother’s big cameo pin.
Credit cards, and cut the phone line.

I couldn’t speak. Or it would have been
Cellar!  Angel!  What I couldn’t
utter. The drumming above their cackles.

Now I sleep at Martha’s in town.
Not quite the same as leaving.
My baby sister.  The only one stayed
close to take care of me.

And daytime in the house is not the same
as staying.  The splintered frame—
door used to could keep it all out.  Two.  White.
The stain on the floor.


Susan Settlemyre Williams is associate literary editor of Blackbird.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Shenandoah, Barrow Street, DIAGRAM, and The Cream City Review, among other journals.  Her manuscript Ashes in Midair was a finalist in the 2004 Tupelo Press first book competition.  She grew up in the Carolinas and has lived for 35 years in Richmond, Virginia.  She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and is retired from law practice.