Ian Spencer Bell
Dredge
Where our house had been are two holes,
the beginnings of a foundation. The Sears
Roebuck plywood greenhouse that was our kitchen
is gone, so is the run-in shed where the white skunk lives
and the patio’s been dumped in the pond.
Not even my hundred-year-old lilacs are here.
And the bats who were sick and crawled on elbows
and slept under sixty-four shutters, they are gone too.
All that’s left is the power line we never buried.
A schoolmaster lived here when it was two rooms
on a working farm before the old trout pond became
Berkshire Trout Pond, and then the shrink
who said at the closing, Beware of the bear
under the porch. Can you believe I lived there
for three years with my ex-husband? I was thirty
and five and twelve and loved him as the father I never had
and once needed. Tonight in the cold blue pool Troy said,
You lived in a tear down.
Had the whole county known?
Ian Spencer Bell reads “Dredge”
Ian Spencer Bell is a dancer and a poet. He lives in Western Massachusetts and in New York City.