Anne McDuffie's essays and reviews have appeared in Rattle, Colorado Review, ABR and the anthology, Short Takes: Brief Encounters with
Contemporary Nonfiction. She received her MFA in 2007 from the Rainier
Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. “Sketches of an
Afternoon” is her first published poem. 

McDuffie says: "After my friend’s father died last spring, I spent a week helping her empty his apartment. This poem came out of the deep sense of his absence in those rooms."

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Sketches of an Afternoon

by Anne McDuffie   

I.

It’s not that dust wants

to refuse us.

Our pleas

grow smaller.

Oh dust, I have come to say

the ridiculous.

I can no longer imagine you

a field with no edges,

the sea miles from shore.

Corners ring with the shouts of children

doing cannonballs into the pool below.

Is it its own reward?

The work, I mean?

Not what is left of it—

these handwritten pages,

these hard-bound books.

Only evidence.

Only by-product.

Husk.

II.

I gather up

blackened knobs

of cupboards,

sleeping seeds

and crumbs,

the ice hollowing

in its trays,

the rimed shallows

of the shower pan, the fine

grit that inscribes each tide.

Calcified frost-blossom, the chrome

lichen-bloom.

Squared silhouettes

where the hooks still hang, stains

that map the carpet.

The battered corner

of a doorway,

baseboards scuffed black.

I gather up

the distilled and the gelid,

the rigid and inert,

minute deposits of all that is touched,

and carried,

and left.

The telephone rings, and a voice wants

to speak about your credit card.

I listen to its forced cheer. How it circles

and cannot touch down.

Behind me a door slams. A window open.

The damp air pushing itself

into the room.

For Stanley Bober, 1932-2008