House

House

An empty house was a found dream,

part of it forgotten, but perhaps not beyond

recall.

                        From Summer Doorways

                        W. S. Merwin

You were the house I wanted to know before I lived

in you, maybe when you were being

built, when every beam and sill, every hand

sawn shingle and cut nail was personal.  I wanted to live

in you when the windows let in enough light,

when every step up to the bedrooms didn’t cost

what it later would.  Because by then the old bones

of your spine were sagging.  Still, they were able to keep

the lonely abandoned woman and her four kids

dry and sort of warm.  I loved you even though

we were either sent outside of you or upstairs

inside of  you, until supper was ready

to be made, potatoes waiting

next to the ground beef thawing in the stainless steel

sink with a bloody wet ring around the Styrofoam

and siran wrap.

I’ve heard it told, old house, that you had ties to a sea

captain whose last voyage was run aground

off Diamond Shoals in 1921, coffee on her stove, spare-

ribs in a pan, spooks already setting a place

of their own, the way later the old handy-

man would slide inside of you, a tinker who came

to hammer old pots, sharpen knives.  You saw him

set up in your old barn and when he took

too long a girl went out with her mother’s one last knife

and find him swinging like a pendulum

from the center beam.

You absorbed him.  You soaked that old captain

who, like his crew, was never found.

You opened your back door and pulled them

into your arms, the way you did all the dead,

the way you would pull my mother

when she fell through your rotten steps.

Sea captains. Lobstermen.  Widows.  Delinquents

spraying their initials on the inside of you

when you went empty

all those years.  Arms as broad yours

must get tired.  They must.  At some point,

giving up the ghost means just that.  Even so

you waited. Ever gracious, no one

was home when you rubbed femur against femur

until they caught and you began your slow way  

down into the fox hole of it all.  The table’s set. 

Bread’s fresh out of the oven.  Potatoes

white as bleach, mashed and finally perfect.

Sometimes I think I’ll drive down that road

for those two and a half or three miles

and look, once I make it, up to the right,

way up the lane, and see your scroll

of simple rafters, your porch whose storm

door hinges went almost all the way

across, as though some wind,

when it came, would lift your skirt

somewhat tenderly, somewhat vulgarly

the way a father might lift the blanket

of his new son, just to check.    

Old crone home, you have been cremated now.

But I keep a singed piece of you I picked up

when I went home long after you were gone, charred

thumb of some window frame or gable end,

and I put you next to all the other dead

in a little model of boat I’ve propped against the wall

of a house that looks somewhat like you. 

And because she sits on her stern, as though

she’s rising up out of the waves, she’s always

floating, like smoke, or running aground, or finally

stopped at the end of a long back and forth swing,

boots skrying the air as though it were beach sand.