Moving

Every day we haul more out.
Every day more remains,
stuff we can neither love nor part with,
shabby, peeling, broken, stained.

Bare redone floors, emptied rooms
ripple with ice-edged air
like the cold of isopropyl on the skin,
or shreds flowing over the galvanized rim
of a bucket of stage mist, melting dry.

“Mama?” calls my grown son,
and the sound shivers, becomes high pitched:
becomes the voice of the three-year-old
we will leave behind with the house.