Our soul is an abode.”
      — Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I walk from region to region of my soul and I discover that I am a bombed city.”
      — Thomas Merton, Journals, March 3, 1953

One room has filtered light, the other darkness.
After years, I return to the house of memories.
Have I come at last to know who I am,
what manner of woman?  In the time
I have been given, Sunday’s child,
have I found a fragment to cherish? 

On the street where I was born, jazz now
echoes from Snug Harbor, restaurants offer
the pleasure of rich seafood dishes. 
Amid this shifting light, the sun sets the river
ablaze — glimpsed through a window, I sense
a current, partly hidden, endless changing.

First the years when suffering wielded its sword:
the dark weight of a pendulum pressing
my frame, deaths of sisters, luminous
in the end. Is the image I search for, buried
in wreckage?  What other veneer must I strip
before turning to the wood on the stair?