Most love poems are addressed to a person. Sharon Black's "Love Poem to My House" speaks to a building, and it does so with the teasing, specific affection people usually keep for someone they know very well. The speaker offers one reason after another for loving the house, and the reasons get stranger and bigger until the poem turns and shows what the love was really about.
The structure is a litany. "Because" opens stanza after stanza, and the refrain "House, I love you" returns like a person patting a wall as they walk past. The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. It runs on the rhythm of speech: long, rambling sentences that spill across line breaks ("a hole in the screen through / which moths make their crossing"), then sudden short ones. "Or the toy chest." "I can do this with my eyes closed." That looseness suits a poem about domestic life, where nothing is tidy and everything is slightly in use.
The early images are small and tactile: "invisible handprints," pushups and cartwheels on the floor, aspirin, garlic and "colored pencil erasers on the windowsill." They are the leftovers of living, the things that pile up in a house without anyone choosing them. Even the moths, which become "still shadows in the overhead fixtures," leave a trace. Then the house begins to grow. It is "filled with moons," it holds "whole oceans," and the speaker admits "if I think about it," which gives away how the poem works. The house expands as far as attention and imagination push it. By the middle it contains the manger ("the house in which Jesus / was born in a barn") and a Florida river flowing "through the kitchen as I whip meringue." The sacred and the geographical wander into the kitchen, and the speaker whips meringue anyway. The joke and the wonder arrive together.
The house is also never one thing for long. It is a "contented cow" sitting in the grass and dreaming of stilts, a rainbow of rooms ("yellow in one room, pink in the next"), an "old, stiff-jointed animal shifting in its sleep," and then "a funny looking book." The book metaphor is the cleverest. Imagined critics find the house "slow, lacking discernible plot," but the speaker "can't stop turning your water-stained pages." A house has no plot, only accumulation, and the poem argues that this is exactly why it holds her. The phrase "water-stained" is typical of the poem's tenderness: a flaw becomes part of the charm.
Notice, too, how the house reaches outward. Its "longest arms" extend into the pharmacy, the water ice stand and the toll plaza, so that errands and traffic become occasions for wanting to get home. Home is a pull as well as a place.
The finest passage comes when the house's "heart changes / shape and moves around." It might be the cabinet of glassware, a high bed, a toy chest, a garden hose "asleep in the garage." The list is ordinary, even humble, yet each item can be the heart. The short sentences work like pulses, and the line "I can hear it beating from where / I happen to be looking" makes the building feel alive.
Then the poem reverses itself. "The truth is, I am really your house." The language turns legal and financial: "repossessed," "estate," "intact." A bank can take a house, and a fire can destroy it, but neither can touch what the speaker carries "whether I'm waiting for a plane / or running at the track." The comic list of reasons turns out to have been a way of building an inventory, and the inventory lives in her. The last line, "but you already know that," is quietly affecting. The house has known all along, and the intimacy of the poem rests on that.
What makes the poem significant is how lightly it handles a large idea. It never lectures about memory or loss. It lets an affectionate, jokey voice pile up images until the reader feels that a home is made of attention and remembered detail, which makes it something no one can repossess.