You’re struck first by the dailiness of everything,
a tour guide settling guests into their chairs,
waxing on the “recently opened up double parlor”
bright with sea foam, molding gilt “as in her day.”
There’s the dining room with its solid bookcase
(The Rosary Reader, Fairy Babies), the very ordinary
kitchen and its 1930s range, egg beaters,
flour sifters, funnels that might as well be from
an estate sale, a thrift shop. Then the narrow
back porch, and beyond that the last light falling
without words on the garden, its benches
shaded and its stone saint still unperturbed,
standing in the center as if to say Lent
with its crushing sadness will soon be over, as if
dispensing through the traffic sounds, the chatter
in the front room, a grace that escapes us, yet
remains just the same, waiting patiently
and with some amusement for us to awaken.