KATE NORTHROP

Inside the Room

There's not much to notice: against the far wall
   an old piano, and taped up beside it

a fly-specked old poster: Our Wildlife
in Pennsylvania. A few shadows

go over the floor, the dark
   abstractions attached

to the geese crying overhead, those keeping
to pattern. You move further in,
and what's outside slides away

as if down the sheer face of a cliff.
Your shoes pinch. It's quiet. Then through the doorway
returning in a long

full skirt, your mother, dead eight years, not quite

as you'd remembered: a little
giddy, heavier in the arms, but somewhat
   musical,

she who never sang coming forward smiling with a broom. Are you
   almost done in here? Excuse me—

so polite, then vanishing. It takes
a long time. The sky's suddenly overcast. A wind
rises against the walls

and there's the sound of thunder approaching,
a heavy rain. Still, though the storm's

torrential, it's an occurrence

in weather, something you assume happens, meaning
   it begins

and ends. So you listen there at the edge
   of a great emptiness

for the arrival of silence,
the ending, the slow opening.