Late for her rafting trip a week ago Sunday,
She never even closed the door.
Today we arrive to catch the open slat inhaling mayflies,
Light Portland rain, plum scents and neighbor sounds.
Her brazen stray must have run in and out,
And finally out when in wasn't any better.

A square of ochre-stained earth pocks the weedy lot
Where rain-gorged wheat grass seeds
Float in a cut-a-way pail, about to be sown.
While those seeds were starting life quietly under the skin of the yard
She would have penned a small poem or another girl band review
On the wicker chaise stretching crooked
Like a three-legged dog in the thick mulgrew.
Her mobile, her admitted afterthought of milky glass shard art,
Clinks and nods like it is any day.

In the basement - this door was open, too -
A crude studio of plastic molds and teardrop beads
And unleashed color tubes
Splay the tin counters
Next to a rented jewelry kiln, rental agency unknown.
Now we are the inheritors of its return,
This industrial metal box coiled with its rigid flues,
Such an unlikely conduit to her.
But beautiful women wear her things that cooked in this kiln,
And we picture them loud and dangly,
At the opera and the Yam Hill synagogue, on the busy espresso line.

Her guitar is upstairs, asleep on its perch
Beside the paisley couch.
It would remember thirty two handmade songs
In its soft carved belly
If only she would pluck them one more time.
Nudes, some very naked, stretch lazy upon the lemon walls:
She was an artist's model, preferred poor artists
Who paid her in portraits to lounge velvet on their canvases.

Through the tidy hallway she dubbed "Shoe City"
Past the straggly plants miming their thirst,
Is her famous kitchen where she avoided cooking,
Sink heaped with dishes
And crowned by a colander snaked with dried spaghetti.
We try not to think about that last Italian dinner,
Or worse, about washing it away.

Candle wax is melted, forgotten where it once solaced
On the edge of the tub on the way to the bedroom
Where the curtains are threadbare and gauzy
And still blow the way she liked: diaphanous, gentle, responsive to her.
This is the hardest room to enter, but we won't go.
Little tarnished Buddha and his incense ash,
Old chandelier crystals, dried wedding roses on a vintage tray.
That crooked coppery stack of her first cd's,
The diaries, thank god, god be damned, the lamp light draped in pink.
All around us are the dangerous walls
Where the photographs stare straight out - they never blink-
And every object bears the address of a memory
Not to her, but to us.

--Melissa Southworth (Lauren's Sister-in-law)