Knotholes

my home is an old and crickety creature
who bends and buckles at the corners
and doesn’t quite close at the seams:
doors won’t shut, hallways squeal,
my fourth bedroom wall hangs limp from the ceiling,
a gap for toes or toys interrupting its affair
with those painted floorboards.

but it doesn’t matter that I can see the basement light
through the kitchen floor;
that our foundation floods with every storm;
or that my mother has just informed me
that a vine on the side of our house
is now peeking through a window frame:

it is the staircase.

away from home,
I remember standing on those ancient steps,
so steep, I climb them when I rush, even now,
palms slapping the warped wood to pull me up faster.

I remember
I must have been three or four,
clutching my favorite blanket
as mother told me something I forget
and in the shadows on the stairs
I picked apart the pale blue fabric
and talked to her through the hole.

and when I was six or seven or five
I would build a bed on the landing,
making a mattress over those knotholes and cracks,
and drift off into my childish dreams
of train tracks, or large bears,
and the parties continued downstairs,
noise floating upwards like clouds of rising steam;
and I only ever half-woke when daddy carried me to bed,
where I would find myself when morning came
and wonder how I fell asleep.

and it is not that I don’t like quiet stairs,
whole ones, stairs with paint or carpet or sealer;
it’s just that the sound of the door opening
calls like an animal in the night
when I tiptoe up the edges, clinging to the walls,
so the boards won’t whine and wake mom and dad
at three AM when I am finally going to sleep.

it is simply that they are home,
they are there,
and I imagine my mom sitting on the third step,
like I do,
whenever she answers the phone.