Most lullabies are sung to a child. Dave Bonta's is sung to a house, and its first command, "Dance, house," is an odd one, since nothing is less likely to dance than a building. The oddness is the point. The poem hushes and soothes its listener, but what it softly insists on is that nothing stays put: not the house, not the people who pass through it, not even the flowers or the moon. The comfort on offer is the comfort of accepting that.
The poem is built largely on whiteness, and every white thing turns out to be unsettling. At night the house is "white as a corpse in moonlight"; by day it is "white as a small hill of salt." The repeated phrase shows the house under two kinds of light, and the second simile is subtler than it looks. Salt preserves things, but it also makes ground barren, and the poem goes on to call the house a "sterile seed." That phrase is the sharpest in the poem. A seed is meant to become something, and this one will not. Flowers at least bloom before they "fade," while the house just sits, and the poem asks how long it can keep doing so. The answer comes bluntly: "You don't have forever."
Against that grim whiteness, the poem sets some playful domestic comedy. Rain becomes the house's "wig," streaming from the eaves, and the roof is an "asphalt-shingled hat." These touches dress the house up like a slightly absurd old figure, which keeps the tone gentle even as the subject darkens. The streaming water also makes the "dance" visible, since a house in heavy rain looks as if it is shifting and shimmering. Judging by the imagery, there may be a faint echo of the old idea of a dance with death, though the poem never says so outright.
People appear only briefly, and they are the least solid things in the poem. "We who pass through you, who sleep / under your . . . hat" are "little more than ghosts." The house, which is dying, still outlasts its occupants. Beyond the walls the world is indifferent or a little menacing. "The earth might move or it might not" shrugs at the possibility of disaster, while thunder arrives like a neighbour, "knocking almost every day in the summer." The moon, which first lit the house like a corpse, now "circles like a madman," a restless figure going round and round and getting nowhere.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only free verse that breathes at irregular lengths. The opening is a clipped two-beat line, and the long sentence about thunder then stretches out, as if the poem were settling into its rhythm. The sound does the work that rhyme would otherwise do. The soft consonants of "asphalt-shingled," "sleep," "sterile seed" and "sail" give the poem a hushing, sibilant quality, which is exactly what a lullaby needs, even as the words themselves are far from reassuring. The ampersand in "& flowers fade" is a small, casual touch that makes the line sound spoken rather than composed.
The ending is the poem's cleverest move. After all the talk of sitting, the view suddenly widens to "the other side of the world," where "a white sail rocks." Only here does the actual motion of a lullaby appear, the rocking of a cradle, and it has been passed from the house to a distant boat. The sail is a white shape like the house, but it has "nothing but water beneath it." The house has foundations and still will not last, whereas the sail has none and rocks on regardless. The image can be read as consoling, because impermanence can be a kind of gentle motion, or as unnerving, because nothing holds anything up. The poem leaves both readings open.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so few lines. It takes a familiar form associated with comfort and uses it for a memento mori, and it does so with humour and tenderness rather than gloom. The poem also treats the house, which we usually think of as the fixed point in our lives, as just another thing drifting through time, and it makes that idea feel soothing.