The Barometer

It hangs where the hall narrows, brass gone dull at the rim, glass split from eleven to rain as if pressure had a nail in it.

My mother taps it before she says good morning. My father did the same with one finger, hard, as if the weather might confess if struck in the correct place.

Fair, it says, through three days of low cloud. Storm, it says, when the sky lifts blue and harmless.

None of us believes it. None of us takes it down.

The house has many kinds of proof: the stair that complains before a foot, the latch that gives in wind, the cup-ring darkening the dresser where somebody always set down tea and never drank it.

Outside, the fields flatten themselves under a pewter morning. Inside, the needle trembles over the wrong word.

I have learned to trust it only as a family instrument: not weather, pressure.

Not what is coming. What stayed.