Repapering the Kitchen

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We probe and scrape and peel away the faded 
Multicolored layers of a lifetime, 
Like Schliemann 
(Who ? Grandmother asks) 
Burrowing the many-layered Troy 
Yearning for a reenactment from another time, 
Such as comes to her like breathing. 

There are fifty years and six or seven layers here: 

Some full white flowers spangling a deep, yet muted pink 
That even I recall 

An ivory vase of tiny purple blossoms 
Clustered there since just before the war 

A simple cup and saucer and a china plate 
Upon a background pastel blue. 

As each new pattern breaks upon the light 
The visions bud and bloom for her, and shimmer 
Out, away 
To bud and bloom and shimmer 
Into bud and bloom 

As she interprets to our blindness, 
In anecdote and tale, 
The echoed genealogies that linger here 
Not far from flesh and blood. 

Who can tell what time it is 
In that one corner of the room 
Where she sits in silence now 
And who or what she sees outside the window 
Or in the pale reflection hovering in the glass?