how can you stand there
and smile and laugh
in my house after all that you've done?
how can they stand there,
relaxed and carefree,
as they laugh
with you?
and how can i be the one who's scolded
for refusing to be polite and
warm and welcoming
to the monster who ruined my life?
One day I was walking
And I discovered an abandoned house
It was an old house, to be sure,
Rotten and strewn about.
Inside this house there were pictures
Of those who inhabited it before
People of all ages
Their lives centered around this old eyesore.
From what I can tell, they were poor
But strangely enough
It seemed like they were happy
Despite it being so tough.
A makeshift swing hung in the yard
Worn from constant use
Despite years of exposure
Not a single string was loose
i would be eight people and then the difficulties vanish
only as one i contain the complications
in a warm house roofed with the rib-cage of an elephant
i pass my grey mornings re-running the reels
and the images are the same but the emphasis shifts
the actors bow gently to me and i envy them
their repeated parts, their constant presence in that world
i would be eight people each inhabiting the other's dreams
walking through corridors of glass framed pages
telling each other the final lines of letters
picking fruit in one dream and storing it in another
only as one i contain the complications
and the images are the same, their constant presence in that
world
While you put your hands, that,
Our surface
Crossing a bridge or
The other way around the back way or head on, coming
to it
To discover the rules
Written into the distance
while your hands
The house, filling with smoke, the angles used
To talk straight, on,
At last be able
To name.
Your hands naming the thrust and space around it, that,
I would bring you bringing me
Close upon it, so we will look, go through
Hands and smoke
Jeffie with your house full of
cockroaches,
In the oven of your house by the sea,
We came - we came, ready for
refreshment,
To the creakings of your house -
To the mussles and sandcrabs on the
beach and in your drawers -
We came to you, in a rush off the
highway,
While you, calmly and pregnantly
cooked artichokes in the kitchen -
Then we all lay down together
Underneath the night sea wind
That played across our tired bodies
Like spanish moss.
no shadow is cast
then coming in from the sun
I find the house dark
our mind-sea foggy clear
hides its scaled creatures
twisting turning movies with their
jungle passions ancient times
crusaders’ flaming crosses
pitiless in ‘faith’
as much a part of me as this treed
half-raked lawn
you hide your armies images
wrapped in your bones
sharing that sea
an attic's cast-off
gowns and gestures where
so many loves and knives
lie buried
in this marsh teeming
left: some clothes and letters
chips on dishes memories
her sisters neighbours
who shared recipes chat
memories of her some
like yours
there was a gap between you
you wanted others in
yet that deep work-a-day back-porch
wordless closeness
pulls you to her -
you die too
now she becomes herself
work struggle worry gone
her crisp voice, sense fill
silent shared rooms
All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering the need
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him--at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off;--and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.
O’er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.
I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;
The whippoorwill is coming to shout
Over back where they speak of life as staying
(‘You couldn’t call it living, for it ain’t’),
There was an old, old house renewed with paint,
And in it a piano loudly playing.
Out in the ploughed ground in the cold a digger,
Among unearthed potatoes standing still,
Was counting winter dinners, one a hill,
With half an ear to the piano’s vigor.
All that piano and new paint back there,
Was it some money suddenly come into?
Or some extravagance young love had been to?
Or old love on an impulse not to care--
Not to sink under being man and wife,
But get some color and music out of life?
The army of things,
like a horde of locusts
has occupied
up to the smallest corners
almost all the space
of my big house, which I just bought.
Memories of my past,
like shy children lie wordlessly
on the angles of the sofas and armchairs.
Greed, like a hussy,
wanders around the rooms,
grinning, showing off,
shouting and cursing.
New house, big, all complete
with everything,
Yet I don’t feel comfortable at all.