Promise of Shelter / The Touchstone: Poems new and selected

• Published in: Michigan quarterly review 2000-07, Vol.39 (3), p.496
• Main Author: Robyn, Sarah
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Poetry
• ISSN: 0026-2420; 1558-7266

Out of open kitchen windows came the sounds and smells of other people's houses: a baby crying, a radio playing, the whine of a vacuum cleaner, a mother singing or scolding, clatter of cutlery, smell of tomato soup, smell of floorwax. Spaces that make a harmony out of an old tree trunk, grey wooden sheds and stairways slanting between walls of buildings, a balcony rail graced with geraniums, a line of washing, a black iron spiral of fire escape, the dance of leaf shadows on a red brick wall. Only a child, alone, may play there, singing a private song, squatting under the fire escape and scraping at the dirt with half of a broken clothes-peg to uncover sacred relics: a blackened penny; a scratched marble; pieces of blue glass, of green glass; a rubber wheel off a Dinky toy, or maybe the hollow body of the truck itself, packed tight with claylike mud; Coke bottle caps, caked with the same mud; a large button, a small button, their holes mud-plugged; an orphaned earring; a key that will open nothing.