405 Reflection Rd.

Sestina

A cluster of aging oak trees orbited
the house. The roof was missing a few shingles
and mildew lay damp in the wall. In the light
flooding through the tall windows of the wide room
I’d play with G. I. Joe figures. Grandmother
gave me a box of See’s every December.

Snowflakes falling from the sky in December:
they sway in the air like dancers in orbit.
Around Christmas, we’d visit my grandmother
up at her house in Apple Valley. Jingle
Bells! I’d spend the night in my father’s old room.
Through his window, crystalline oaks caked in white.

Years passed and I saw the dimming of her light.
She’d think it was May when it was December
and not know how she had gotten to a room.
Newton’s force sustains planets’ solar orbit
but no lure could hold her here. A stray shingle.
My mother explained to me, Your grandmother

has dementia, which means that your grandmother’s
losing her memory and can’t think straight. Light
floods through the windows, G.I. long gone. Shinglers
stomp around on the roof. Come this September
the walls will be made fully unabsorbent.
By then she had been moved to a lonely room

in an assisted living building. The room’s
windows looked out at the fence. My grandmother
had forgotten that we put Man in orbit.
She’d try and guess my name but was rarely right.
She’d ask the nurse, Where am I? (no remembrance
of having moved to Des Moines) when her shingles

smarted and woke her up at night. Her shingles,
scarlet sunspots. 	              Packed into the holy room,
the snowflakes dancing outside. Died December
29th. Down the nave aisle rolls grandmother.
Through the colored stained-glass windows, hallowed light.
Star Tribune published her obituary.

Rain drips down new shingles and off grandmother’s
house. Toys orbit a newborn bathed in sunlight.
Some new family filled its rooms that December.

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Originally published in issue 13 of Palaver Arts Magazine at the University of Southern California.