Have you seen those houses,
spacious, serene, with nothing in them?
And then there are houses like mine,
cluttered beyond belief; my Roma wife
must have thought: “maybe there’s a fortune
behind the boxes under the bed?”
I showed her one of those boxes once:
poems, letters, thousands of keepsakes,
journals, the beginnings of novels, scraps
which are the holy gospels of individual memory.
The Roma with a perfect nose had hoped
for hallways never-ending, living rooms
with tasteful furnishings, a bedroom
with a simple, large bed. Her wants are few.
She has a perfect nose. A clean bedroom.
Why can’t she have one?