Under the Stairs
Until I was ten years old I lived with my parents in my grandmother’s house in Brewerytown, Philadelphia. It had a cellar with furnace and coal bin and a workbench and tools. It also served as a storeroom for old furniture, a Victrola phonograph, records of Sousa marches and Irish ballads of pre-World War I vintage, tea sets, a large ball of used tinfoil . . . relics of her younger years.
Currently Jane and I also have a storage place. We have no cellar, so “stuff” no longer used is banished to an empty bedroom whose every square foot is occupied by plastic bags of God knows what, children’s books, my deceased son’s record collection (heavy metal), a closet of shirts now some 25 years old, a bed dating from the mid 1800’s . . . We keep the door shut, the room unheated – and periodically I complain to Jane about hiring someone to get rid of it all to which her immediate reflex is: “No, I want to go through it first.” Which means never!
And then one day at our local hospital, while waiting for Jane’s visit to the lab, I picked up a New Yorker magazine and read a poem by Angela Leighton, a Cambridge University poet and scholar – its title Under the Stairs:
Houseroom for things you forget or try to imagine:
a saw, two planks of plywood, a jam jar full of nails, . . .
a coal scuttle, pair of breathless bellows –
implements in their places, for love, for sorrow –
and something immeasurably near, nudging the hardware.
It’s where you put things, see? Out of sight, on hold.
They wait, unredeemed, unclaimed, for decades or more . . .
Is it in there, still? That ancient, reflex scare,
A dream of hiding, trapped under infinite stairs, . . .
Childhood’s pit of dares, daredevil’s den,
Cache of keeps and losses, teases and thrills – . . .
Open the door a crack and you smell it still,
below-stairs air, too near, too close to home.
Since my graduate school years I have been immersed in biblical studies, trying to interpret that anthology of some 2000 years of ancient images and wisdom, often self-contradictory but ever refreshingly enlightening, moving, full of vital ghosts of the past – as if the ancient drama and poetry and parables and soliloquies like Paul’s ode to love, if we were but to raise them (as Angela says) out of that “Houseroom for things you forget”,
somehow we’d know, in that indoor earthy closeness,
a sudden beauty: their answering, lonely faces.
Opportunities occur here at St. Leo’s for venturing “downstairs” into the region of Abraham, Deborah, Job, the seashore of Galilee, a wedding in Cana, the memory of an excursion along the road to Emmaus – things stored away but ever ready to be profitably brought upstairs again and put to use.