63 Home poems

When we first moved here, pulled the trees in around us, curled our backs to the wind, no one had ever hit the moon—no one. Now our trees are safer than the stars, and only other people's neglect is our precious and abiding shell, pierced by meteors, radar, and the telephone. From our snug place we shout religiously for attention, in order to hide: only silence or evasion will bring dangerous notice, the hovering hawk of the state, or the sudden quiet stare and fatal estimate of an alerted neighbor. This message we smuggle out in its plain cover, to be opened quietly: Friends everywhere— we are alive! Those moon rockets have missed millions of secret places! Best wishes. Burn this.

Years later, the water still drips— there's no one to tighten the valve. It courses through old pipes down to the septic tank. Next morning in the cellar I start the motor with a stick. It shakes and rumbles, and chirps— the switch is broken is all. At night the water arrives illegally, undergroundly, to the very grave where last spring parsley sprouted, and at the foot, beside it, feral sorrel darkens tastily and tartly like clandestine sex. The motor lifts the spirits and returns the night's deductions. It's morning, I hum softly— a stranger will replace me. In the cellar a stream of light rinses the window grate, it pulses, strikes the meter— I catch my rhythm on the stairs. And for memory's sake I hum— as I pass the septic tank— a fluid, underground song about sorrel and a stranger.

1 I seek a permanent home, but this structure has an appearance of indifferent compoundedness and isolation, heading toward hopelessness. The boy pulls an animal on a leash. The house with a red roof rests between two hills. I can look through its windows to the sea. His aggression opposes what in a domestic animal, cold open space, large enough to work with isolation? House is the projection, space around it intermediary, theater. You don’t have to consume the space to exist, distance, point-to-point, in which a beloved ruin is middle ground, for example. 2 First house and space negate one another. Then, they’re a series. The boy watches a mouse run around the rim of a lampshade. He relates wanting to catch a mouse with the room, ground. Wanting a master image obscures ground, like objects in space. House and space are composite, like my dream, a bubble, lightning, starting point and any second place. 3 Rain pours out a gutter onto the poor horse. Horse runs under a tin roof supported by poles. Stockpiles of beams, salvaged wood, brick melt into contextless waste. I understand the situation by perceiving parts, one after another, then reversing in a glance that removes time. So, I can intuit contextless waste as ground. 4 The water tank sits on a frame of used wood, like a packing crate. I look through it to an extinct volcano. The panorama is true figuratively as space, and literally in a glass wall, where clouds appear like flowers, and the back-lit silhouette of a horse passes by. A file of evergreens secures the cliff amid debris from a crew bilding, as at the edge of the sea. Oranges, dumplings, boiled eggs take on the opaque energy of a stranger. Knowledge as lintel, bond beam (model signs) holds the world at a distance. A master image like bone condenses from the indistinct point-to-point feeling of self with which construction began. My house returns from outside, as if my spirit had been blocking my path, when I wasn’t going anywhere in particular. 5 Materials and freedom combine, so materials aren’t subjective. The material of space is like having a skeleton to gain a vantage point on seamless distance, as in a comparison. It’s a style of accumulating materials that does not become a solid thing, anymore. Accommodating a view by being able to be seen through is perceptual, not abstract, like space painted white. Give a house the form of an event. Relate it to something there, a form of compassion. Your point of view is: it’s solid already, so there’s warmth. In this primitive situation, pure form translates a former empire of space as wilderness. Chinese space breaks free from the view in front of me, while my house continues to rotate on earth.

We sold it. To a man who would be a patriarch. I told John we were closed in, subdivisions and trailers all around, complaints of the smell (though there was none), Ira came out and told me to keep them fenced (though none broke out), the neighbors frightened because someone’s cousin’s friend heard of a hog that ate a child who fell in the pen (though their children rode my sows at feeding time), because I was tired, because Jan carried our child and could no longer help, because she wanted a home. And the patriarch lost his first crop to weeds, threw a rod in the tractor, dug a basement and moved the trailer on for extra bedrooms, cut the water lines for a ditch, subdivided the farm and sold the pigs for sausage. I told John they were his, they were no longer mine, I couldn’t be responsible. The wire connecting our voices was silent for a moment. “You stupid sonofabitch,” was all he finally said. “You poor stupid bastard.”

Home whose names are produced by motion is where people go (one following the next as she hums to herself or he hums to himself at some risk to all) to stay in a family plot the tales of which are spinning like blades on a pinwheel wafted by my desire to talk to you. Fate and desire, chance and intention, from time to time converge. Most people want things to be good but taking a programmatic approach to getting it would be despicable and none of it would ever get to you except via a raucous garage sale. The owner of the pharmacy at this very moment is screaming in jubilation at a silver toaster, I want it even if it doesn’t work! Two firemen have broken down mid-sentence and gone out to look, you know the ones. The purport comes all at once at the end in such a way that one is thrown back to the poem again to carry out the ”again“ that the poem is about. I’ll get a library card at last and I won’t pay $100 for it feeling tired but only as tired as one would normally feel at sea level after, say, a five hour hike, and it was the same when it was just getting light—a murky gray that never brightened. I don’t know you well enough to break away from my conversations in order to barge in on yours and give the illusion that I often know where I’m going or where I want to go with certainty of motive to propel the prose or some version of certainty of my own, not knowing where one is going but going anyway. Perhaps the trip will be purposeless. Destiny is simply a good excuse for experience. There are birds chirping, smoke is rising from kerosene-splattered barbecue briquettes, it is summer and now, humiliated (I am so damned naive sometimes), swinging the hips to the right to avoid the edge of the worktable, then to the left to avoid toppling the cactus I shout, “Things! Things! Get out of my way!” I’ve never lost my capacity for being angry. I feel that it is justified, even necessary, though I admit that after the first hour my improvisations contribute nothing but motion to the composition.

Not a study or a den, but El Florida as my mother called it, a pretty name for the room with the prettiest view of the lipstick-red hibiscus puckered up against the windows, the tepid breeze laden with the brown-sugar scent of loquats drifting in from the yard. Not a sunroom, but where the sun both rose and set, all day the shadows of banana trees fan-dancing across the floor, and if it rained, it rained the loudest, like marbles plunking across the roof under constant threat of coconuts ready to fall from the sky. Not a sitting room, but El Florida, where I sat alone for hours with butterflies frozen on the polyester curtains and faces of Lladró figurines: sad angels, clowns, and princesses with eyes glazed blue and gray, gazing from behind the glass doors of the wall cabinet. Not a TV room, but where I watched Creature Feature as a boy, clinging to my brother, safe from vampires in the same sofa where I fell in love with Clint Eastwood and my Abuelo watching westerns, or pitying women crying in telenovelas with my Abuela. Not a family room, but the room where my father twirled his hair while listening to eight-tracks of Elvis, read Nietzsche and Kant a few months before he died, where my mother learned to dance alone as she swept, and I learned salsa pressed against my Tía Julia’s enormous breasts. At the edge of the city, in the company of crickets, beside the empty clothesline, telephone wires, and the moon, tonight my life is an old friend sitting with me not in the living room, but in the light of El Florida, as quiet and necessary as any star shining above it.

See this house, how dark it is Beneath its vast-boughed trees! Not one trembling leaflet cries To that Watcher in the skies— ‘Remove, remove thy searching gaze, Innocent of heaven’s ways, Brood not, Moon, so wildly bright, On secrets hidden from sight.’ ‘Secrets,’ sighs the night-wind, ‘Vacancy is all I find; Every keyhole I have made Wails a summons, faint and sad, No voice ever answers me, Only vacancy.’ ‘Once, once … ’ the cricket shrills, And far and near the quiet fills With its tiny voice, and then Hush falls again. Mute shadows creeping slow Mark how the hours go. Every stone is mouldering slow. And the least winds that blow Some minutest atom shake, Some fretting ruin make In roof and walls. How black it is Beneath these thick boughed trees!

We could hear her knocking down strands of cobweb from ceilings—sticky filaments, sacs of eggs—as we woke most mornings to a worm of discontent. It lodged beneath the heart, rubbed our frayed nerves, gnawed at the gut, spleen, ovaries. Filth was Mom's first enemy, so each day began with ritual cleaning: the stab and sweep of the broom down the dark hall, over the stained and scratched oak floors. For weeks, she held her dust mop one-handed, and with the other cupped a hernia, while she swore at us kids in that hard voice—a litany of our sins and failures: sloth, stupidity, secrecy. We watched her smash the spiders that ran, herky-jerky, along the baseboards, while we ran, too. Glaring at each other, we gathered up the scattered laundry, our father’s shoes, his newspapers and tools, our books, drawings, music, sweatshirts, and jackets, whatever we’d left lying around. We were guilty, but good at evasion. We cultivated shrewish or obsessive behaviors of our own: my tough older sister sneered and stalked out of the house to meet her boyfriend; my sweet younger sister trembled and cried, comforted by one of our many dogs. I slammed doors, pounded them with my fists, screamed, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” She couldn’t leave us alone. She loved us too much. Though we were quick, she was quicker. Her words stung. We must have deserved it.

More discontents I never had Since I was born, than here; Where I have been, and still am, sad, In this dull Devonshire. Yet justly too I must confess, I ne'er invented such Ennobled numbers for the press, Than where I loath'd so much.

Rent a flatbed with a winch. With the right leverage anything can be hoisted, driven off. Or the man with a Bobcat comes in, then the hauler with his enormous truck. A leveler or a lawyer does the rest; experts always are willing to help. The structure was old, rotten in spots. Hadn't it already begun to implode? Believe you've just sped the process up. Photographs, toys, the things that break your heart—let's trust they would have been removed, perhaps are safe with the children who soon will have children of their own. It's over. It's time for loss to build its tower in the yard where you are merely a spectator now. Admit you'd like to find something discarded or damaged, even gone, and lift it back into the world.