Structure of Houses
       

Something stared at
the moment before you recognize it as itself

The moment extends into recognition:
the inside of a skull,
the walls, feather-bone,
extend into fingers of buildings,
streets, twists of a forearm,
and smile, smile imperviously

The wall as a wall stops my mind
with edges fluting down into a baby's flesh,
the character of a number

while at home time goes back through the furniture,
old relatives' faces almost forming in woodgrain.
Home is a pillow, a pillow filled with my grandmother's life

which collected in cupboards—
each face from two or three pictures,
the long line of names

The figures on printed cotton run in lines, unending as the land's lines,
even when broken off into a field, a piece of cloth

the remembered patch of cracked plaster luminous,
and the space for remembering

a door in my head,
until it becomes experience
of a door,
shapely and bare as the panels,
the house and I, halls passing inside each other,
continual framing and spacing

I want a big house,
a house that is not my clothes,
in which my clothes will become monumental,
face me dryly.

Copyright © 2009 Allen Strous All rights reserved
from Tired
The Backwaters Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission