Here, At Home (Cerveny)

I hear every little thing now.  How the furnace clicks on, and the rush of warm air that vibrates the register cover in the spare bedroom.  It makes a tinny sound, like a child’s wind-up toy.  How the quiet gets deeper, yet I seem to hear it more loudly when the furnace kicks off.

How the release of water into the refrigerator‘s ice maker sounds like air bubbling from the underside of a pool mattress, and a few moments later, the hard clunk of cubes into the bin.

I am surprised to hear how heavily my tiny feral cat’s paws land on the stairs when she rushes down for supper, and how her bowl bumps gently against the baseboard, keeping time as she methodically licks the dish clean.

Cars drive past the house less frequently now, and so I take note of them.  I don’t remember doing that before.  It’s interesting to hear how some drivers race toward the dead-end of my long street and others – probably my neighbors – drive more slowly approaching home.  The sound the wheels make on the pavement is so different for each. The racers sound like a band-aid being ripped off, or a roller applying paint to a wall.

For a few days last week, the weather warmed and I rushed to put up some screens.  Then the days were filled with birdsong, chipmunk chatter, and barking dogs.  The spring wind was just short of fierce that week, and the graceful soughing of the hemlocks’ feathered branches painted a soft brush of cool against the red rash of grass mowers, leaf blowers.

Now, the cold and snow have returned.  My attention is focused inward again; on the creak of the floor in just that one spot between the dining room and the kitchen; the insistent tick of the Seth Thomas on the mantel as it clicks the day forward.  The dry rasp of my pencil on the page.

Kathleen Cerveny, 2013-14 Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate and twice the City’s Haiku Death Match champion, blogs semi-regularly via Pay Attention, http://kathleencerveny.wordpress.com. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and the international anthology, Poems for Malala Yousafzai. Her chapbook, Coming to Terms was published by NightBallet Press in 2015.