Poem: "Childhood House" by Eric Ormsby, with commentary added

After our mother died, her house, our childhood house, disclosed
all its deterioration to our eyes.
While living she had screened us from, or we hadn't seen,
the termite-nibbled floorboards and the rotting beams;
the wounded stucco hidden by shrubbery; the frayed,
unpredictable wiring, and the clanking labor
of the hot-water line into the discolored
tub; the fixtures in the dining room
skewed and malfunctioning.

                                          I remember thinking with a
swarm of confusion that this was the true state
of our childhood now: this house of dilapidated girders
eaten away at the base. Somehow I had assumed
that the past stood still, in perfected effigies of itself,
and that what we had once possessed remained our possession
forever, and that at least the past, our past, our child-
hood, waited, always available, at the touch of a nerve,
did not deteriorate like the untended house of an
aging mother, but stood in pristine perfection, as in
our remembrance. I see that this isn't so, that
memory decays like the rest, is unstable in its essence,
flits, occludes, is variable, sidesteps, bleeds away, eludes
all recovery; worse, is not what it seemed once, alters
unfairly, is not the intact garden we remember but,
instead, speeds away from us backward terrifically
until when we pause to touch that sun-remembered
wall the stones are friable, crack and sift down,
and we could cry at the fierceness of that velocity
if our astonished eyes had time.

Okay, some commentary. First of all, this isn't about my parents' house falling apart. Their house looks great! Everything is ship shape there! My childhood house is fine too, I imagine. Students live there now, but it's standing.

This poem grabs me because it's about memory. Carl shared this with me, I think, but my memory is not 100% on that detail. I know he'll post any necessary corrections to my tale.

This poem is filled with truth with a lower case 't'. That's my phrase right there. Listen to me say it, listen to me play it. (What?) It's a handy teaching phrase, and my students get used to hearing it too. Truth with a capital T is absolute/religious/universal truth. That's not the kind of truth I'm referring to. This kind of truth is humanity truth, details and observations that resonate in our hearts and minds.

Ormsby's observation that "memory eludes all recovery," for example, feels right. The "fierceness of that velocity" is heartbreaking. My favorite bunch of lines is this:  "Somehow I had assumed / that the past stood still, in perfected effigies of itself, / and that what we had once possessed remained our possession / forever, and that at least the past, our past, our child- / hood, waited, always available, at the touch of a nerve,"

Ormsby gave words to something I intuited but did not know I knew and did not know how to express.
Here's my other *favorite* bunch of words about memory, taken from "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner. I've read and taught this story so many times that it feels hardwired into my brain.


"They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men—some in their brushed Confederate uniforms—on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road, but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years."