not Poetry Thursday

American Ready Cut System Houses

 

Heather Derr-Smith

Your postcard said, Nothing like a little disaster to sort things out.

 

Blueprints, sketches, such perfect houses in the photograph on the              

front,
all the lines true and in harmony. I took it with me like a paper charm,

 

searching for home, hit the road, looking for the exact spot
of my birthright, down the rustling path of thistles and nettles,

 

under a leaden sky, in the place where God once lifted the home by its        

hair,
nothing left but the kitchen and the bathtub where we all hid. The                

supper table

 

picked up and carried to the county over and laid so gently down.

 

When I saw you last in the bar in Brooklyn, you told me to sing. But I          

couldn’t

 

even speak. I laid my head in your lap, drunk at two am and felt your          

hand
resting across my back, reluctant, unsure of what I wanted, but                    

knowing

 

it was a want too much for anyone to give in to, a halter
broke, some rip.

 

The skeletons of the trees are coming back to life now, sap like stars
risen again. Most anything torn can be mended. No real permanent            

damage.

 

The land where the house was

 

goes back to the plum-colored dusk, hooks and hoods of the hawks
perching in the Hemlocks, clouds and mounds of nebulae in the sky in        

the pitch night.

 

Frank Lloyd Wright said, nature will never fail you, though, I suppose        

it depends
on what you mean by fail. It’ll kill you for sure, Great Revelator.

 

You can hear the wilderness ad-libbing its prayers in the                                

whip-poor-will and the cypress,
in the percussion and boom of bittern in the bulrushes.

 

Dead is the mandible, alive the song, wrote Nabokov.

 

The bones of our houses, the house of our bones
dropped in a sudden blur of wind and wings,

 

but our voices still throb and palpitate somewhere, by some rapture,
in memory’s ear, in the fluttering pages, behind the stars.

 

I have a song now I want to sing to you, but you’re long gone.
When you said I’m here for you, was that a promise?

 

Overwhelm,

 

to bury or drown beneath a huge mass

 

Whelmen: to turn upside down

 

To turn over and over like a boat washed over and overset by a wave

 

To bring to ruin.

 

The end of one part of the world, a story that no longer has a witness.

 

But I’ll sing it to myself. I’ll sing it to the small moth,
the size of scarcely a word,

 

Ad libitum, according to my desire.