The Empty Cistern of My Childhood Home

lies beneath our former driveway, now an added room

for TV and relaxing. After the town piped water into

our neighborhood, my parents talked about knocking

a door through the basement wall into it

for extra storage, and I imagined something vault-like,

an airlock door with a big wheel like a submarine’s.

When I asked what was in there, they said nothing,

maybe an inch of water, but it was sealed up tight.

Now I wish it were a bubble-case around something

of our past, old furniture, the comfortable chair

and reading light my father used, a side table

drink-ring marred and the newspaper quarter-folded

the way he read it. Likely everything’s mold-fuzzed,

water bugs or worms on the ground, but I imagine

our home’s new owners jackhammer open a door, and

my father’s ghost looks up and a small version of me—

if not happier than I am now, then more something—

on the floor with a favorite forgotten toy. Content

might be the word there to describe that boy, his

yellow sweatshirt, furry muppet slippers, tangled hair.

Gary Leising is the author of the book, The Alp at the End of My Street, from Brick Road Poetry Press (2014). He has also published three poetry chapbooks: The Girl with the JAKE Tattoo (Two of Cups Press, 2015), Temple of Bones (Finishing Line Press, 2013), and Fastened to a Dying Animal (Pudding House, 2010) He lives in Clinton, New York, with his wife and two sons, where he teaches creative writing and poetry as a professor of English.