The smell is the thing,
the kitchen looks like you just stepped away for a minute--
counter dusted with flour,
twin, thick, shiny, braids of eggbread
left to cool...now cold.
Dried herbs hang over cast iron stove,
and a bakers rack filled to overflowing with
muffin tins, bundt cake pans, recipe boxes,
and crumpled in the space between the flour and sugar canisters
is that old stained apron you always wore.

On a wide sun-drenched sill over the soapstone sink
are containers of spring bulbs you forced into life;
perky paperwhites,bright yellow and red tulips,and
heavy-headed grape hyacinth that nod on their slender green stalks like dopers.

The kitchen table, small and round,
is strewn with bills, two packs of parliaments,
one pack of nicorette gum,
and two opened and empty boxes of
dramamine lean against
the white ceramic of a potted red poinsietta.

Beyond the kitchen in the livingroom is
a small blue spruce you
cut down with your own hands in the woods behind the barn,
and then decorated with red and green plaid bows,
and white tipped pine cones,
and your last surviving glass ornaments from that other life and time.

The livingroom walls are a collage of family photographs
taken a lifetime ago when you were still you--before
the depression
before
the manic,
frantic,
frenzied flight from the faces in the pictures.
It is as if you love them more this way;
suspended,
seperated by glass,
unable to touch you.
You, who once could not let an hour go by without kissing your daughter's hair.

The bedroom door is open and a poster of Rosie the Riveter,
her denim clad bicep flexed above the slogan:
"WE CAN DO IT" hangs over your bed.
The night table closest to the door is littered with cigarette butts,
and ashes from an overturned glass ashtray.
A small tin pot with a half melted black plastic handle rests
among the debris.
On the opposite night stand is a copy of Jack Keruoac's
The Town and The City,
an empty fifth of vodka, and two amber plastic prescription bottles, their white caps
missing.

The bed has not been stripped.
The stain you left there is visible even from behind the yellow caution tape.
The smell is the thing.
Not the sick-room smell of someone who is clinging to life but dying anyway.
No, this smell is sweet, thick, strange.
It fills my nose and my mouth
and for days after that day
I will taste that smell in the back of my throat.