A house jack is not a glamorous object: a threaded screw that someone turns, slowly, until a building rises a fraction at a time. Dave Bonta's short poem takes this humble tool and rebuilds a fairy tale around it. The pun is in the name. "Jack" is the boy of "Jack and the Beanstalk," and a house jack is also a real device for lifting houses. The poem lets the two meanings climb on top of each other.
The first line, "This time, there are no magic beans," is the most regular in the poem, with a steady beat of eight syllables that sounds like a storyteller's opening formula. Then it refuses what the formula promises. In the story, Jack trades a cow for beans and gets a miracle. Here the miracle has to be earned. "Every man-jack turns into / an acme-threaded beanstalk" is the poem's central trick. "Every man-jack" is an old idiom for "every single person," but here it also suggests each worker at each jack. "Turns into" means both transformation and rotation, because turning is exactly what a screw jack does. The line break after "into" leaves the reader hanging for a moment, as though the change might still be magic, before the answer arrives in a technical phrase. Acme is a real type of screw thread, which the poem seems to be using literally. It is also a word for the highest point, so the engineering term quietly points upward. Readers who know cartoons may hear one more echo, of the Acme crates in Road Runner cartoons, though that is my inference, not something the poem insists on.
After this brisk, witty opening, the camera drops to ground level. "The hound under the porch / noses at the growing / hoard of sunlight." The dog is the poem's only living witness, and it responds the way a dog would, by sniffing. Judging by the imagery, lifting the house opens up the dark space beneath it, so light pours in where there was shade. The poem never says so outright, and it doesn't need to. "Hoard" brings in the giant's treasure from the fairy tale and a dragon's pile of gold, but the treasure here is sunlight, free and piling up. "Growing" is borrowed from the beanstalk and handed to the light.
The sound of the poem does some quiet work as well. "Hound," "house" and "hoard" cluster around the same breathy opening, and "hound" and "house" share a vowel, so the dog and its home are tied together by sound. More striking is the near-twin pair "growing" and "groaning." One word belongs to the plant of the fairy tale, the other to straining timber. Together they suggest that this growth has a cost. No spell is involved, only effort, and the old house complains as it goes up. "Groaning" could also be the sound of the people turning the jacks, though the poem leaves that open.
The poem is built from three unrhymed tercets, with no rhyme to chime the ending shut. The first stanza is a self-contained announcement, but the second and third form a single sentence, pushed along by enjambment: "the growing / hoard," "the old house / climbs groaning." The sentence rises as slowly as the house does. The lines are short, mostly four to six syllables, so the poem is a thin column on the page, a stalk of its own. It ends on "into the sky," with a long, open vowel in "sky" and no more ground to stand on.
The last image reverses the tale. Jack climbs the stalk, but here the house itself climbs, so it becomes a kind of castle in the clouds, carried up by ordinary hands and ordinary steel. The title promises an "Ode," a form traditionally used for grand praise, and the poem keeps the promise without ever addressing the jack directly. It praises by showing the tool at work.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. In nine lines it argues that wonder doesn't require magic. Patient labor, a well-cut thread and many people turning together can deliver something just as impossible-seeming as a bean sprouting to the heavens. It is funny, but it is also tender toward the old house, which the poem treats as something alive and effortful, and toward the dog, who is the first to notice the light.