Instructions for a housesitter usually concern protection: lock this, set that, keep the cat in. Mary F. C. Pratt's poem opens by removing all of it. "If the door has blown closed, open it. / You do not need a key." In two lines the house stops being guarded property and becomes an open place that the wind can walk into. Everything after that follows from this first act of trust.
The form is plain. There are eight quatrains of free verse with no rhyme, and the lines are short and built from small, ordinary words. Most lines end with a full stop or a natural pause, so the poem reads like a note pinned to a kitchen wall: "Feed the birds." "Make wine from the grapes." This plainness is what makes the poem work. The speaker never raises their voice or explains, and the calm, practical tone makes the stranger things sound ordinary.
The grammar shifts at the midpoint. The early stanzas are imperatives: *open, feed, pick, eat, cook, milk*. From "The dogs will kiss / you awake" onward, the verbs become future tense: the cats *will sing*, the animals *will tell*, the owls *will come*. The sitter starts as the one who acts and ends as the one acted upon. The line break helps here. "The dogs will kiss / you awake" lets "you awake" settle softly onto its own line, like waking itself.
The imagery is concrete and mostly sensory, and it is carried by colour and touch. There is the "blue jar" of seed, the "yellow pears," the "deep green weeds," the "copper basin" of rainwater and the "great gray owl." Weeds, which most gardeners would pull out, are recast as food: "Cook them in oil. / They will make you strong." Some instructions have no practical purpose at all. "When dew shines on the leaves / go out and wet your feet" asks for contact with the morning and nothing else. Even the single prohibition, "Do not eat the yellow pears," comes with a reason ("for they are bitter") rather than an order. It is the advice of someone who knows the place well, not a rule enforced by authority.
Time also gives the poem its shape. It moves through a day, with dew, sunrise and sunset milking, bedtime, and finally midnight. Midnight is where ordinary household routine runs out, and it is where the poem's strangest moments sit. The animals "will tell you / what they wish to eat," which is believable enough. Then, in a repeated phrase, they "will tell you / what to dream." The repetition of "They will tell you" makes the second claim sound as matter-of-fact as the first, and that is what unsettles us. The poem treats the animals' authority over a human's dreams as just another household fact.
The ending follows the same method. "The great gray owl / will speak. Listen." The definite article suggests one particular owl, known to the house. The last word is the shortest sentence in the poem, and the only instruction that asks for no action. The poem never says what the owl says. We are put in the sitter's position: told that something worth hearing is coming, and left to wait for it.
The poem is significant for how quietly it reverses an everyday idea. A housesitter is hired to look after a place, but here the place looks after the sitter. It feeds, washes, wakes and puts them to sleep, and even supplies their dreams. The poem began by opening a door, and it ends by asking for another kind of openness, a willingness to be taught by things we usually think we manage. The poem never says who the absent speaker is. Judging by the voice, though, it is someone who trusts the garden, the animals and the night more than any lock. By dressing a lesson in humility as a list of chores, the poem makes the lesson feel less like a lecture and more like an invitation to stay.