Residence, Laramie, Wyoming

If we think of time as a bolt

of cloth we cut swatches from, blue

cotton that begins its immediate slow

fray, then for a moment you were

the newest well-built thing in the world:

the perfect angle of your peaked roof,

unwarped frames of your windows,

glass so clear it almost isn’t there.

Then those who planned you hanged

white curtains, arranged the furniture—

the kitchen table with its smooth

wood legs, the brown leather loveseat

against a dustless living room wall.

The closets grew gray suits, a patterned

morning dress with sunflowers, the yellow

still brilliantine and deep twenty years

before it faded to unripe lemon rind.

And the bassinet in the nursery upstairs

a room whose walls they papered

with cartooned race cars. As the body does,

when it’s allowed to grow old, the bones

of the house will eventually begin to creak,

the plumbing to lose its constant wrestle

to contain the push of water

like blood through clogging arteries. But

Matthew, that much is the future: as the painter

puts away his brush, canvas filled with another

well-made thing, the house you grew up in

with its green lawn and shrubs spreading

forever out of the frame, no one knows but he

how they will beat you and string you up

like a painting on a cattle fence outside Laramie.

No one knows you will not live. No one knows

how many will say it could have been me.