WEBVTT

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Sometime ago, I was
living in or spending

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some time in a
very small house up

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in the foothills of the Sierra.

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It was a fairly
isolated place and there

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were a great many things about
the house that reminded me

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of the kind of house in which
I grew up in Pennsylvania.

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It's a poem that comes out of
the experience of that house

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and the kinds of presences that
I suppose any house evokes.

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It's called drinking cold water.

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And the woman in the
poem is my grandmother.

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Almost 20 years since you
put on your good dress

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and lay down in the shale
hills of Pennsylvania,

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what you expected from life
was nothing much and it came,

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and so it was.

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In California, I
mourned and then forgot

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though sometimes
in a mirror I saw

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someone walked from the weeds
stepping from a shine of water

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and it was you shining.

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Tonight, I brought my bundle
of years to an empty house.

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When I opened it, a boy walked
out drinking cold water,

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watching the moon rise slim
and shining over your house.

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Whatever it was I wanted
must have come and gone.

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20 years grandmother.

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Here I stand in the poverty of
my feet and I know what you do.

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You would enter your
black shawl, step back

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into the shadows of your hair,
and that's no help tonight.

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All I can think of is your
house, the pump at the sink

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spilling a trough of clear
cold water from the well,

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and you old love sleeping
in your dark dress

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like a hard white root.

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