Waves

Some days the house was like a houseboat
and she would wave from the floating door
and the Other would wave from the floating letter

              bobbing like a paper hat upon the waves,

and an incense or innocence would rise like smoke
from the waters although you could not see it,
not even when the boy cut through it

              in his little dinghy on the way to school,

ringing his bell as if he were an ordinary boy,
the carpenter's ruler coiled
in his pocket like a yellow snake

              for show-and-tell.

But now, while the boy is away,
and the house is obscured among drifting
angles and aims and aches and wants

              for nothing, softly knocking

against the small ladder of the dock
where it is moored to silence,
and the question of stairs-to-stars

              is infinite and infinitely far away

and death and love are not, for once,
the only hosts of silence and solace,
and space itself, color itself, motion itself

              is holy, holy,

a what's outside the body is time
and what's inside the body is time
and just now, they meet upon waves

              which wave and wave to time...

Hours like this
belong to the house
and we are wrong to take them.

              But, locked in the winter of our life,

let us fold a boat out of our old desires
and launch it out upon the surface
of what, shimmering,

              is.

Copyright © 2005 Robin Behn All rights reserved
from Columbia: A Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission