Tuesday, October 22, 2013

EDGE BEFORE THE FALL

 
The house speaks.
Aloneness after lunch.
Ants in between
the tiles above the sink,
the dark and now the light,
the home they’ve found,
a swarming sudden crowd
in their crowding blues,
in this chink of time,
on their own straight line.
I must get rid of them
( what would you do?)
I can’t be covered yet
by crawling silence.
 
The house speaks.
A leak from upstairs
and drops on the armchair
and the dog leaving it,
just annoyed or scared,
it’s the neighbor I learn,
ninety-six, he has messed
with the shower. Who helps him?
I wonder, in this house that speaks.
 
I am alone in it. In my beloved
desert lot. That’s it.
And I am still alive.
I didn’t choose to be alone
( and I didn’t choose to be alive either).
Life happens as it happens,
God knows, or does he?
Life happens
like a house that speaks.
 
In its many leaks.
I listen in the night to noises
that might be unspoken words,
in the pressing of the walls
and a silence of my own.
I’ve grown yes, I’ve grown.
And ripeness is all.
 
The house speaks.
And maybe I am bound
to love the unknown.
I am perched on my own
edge before the fall.

1 comment:

Crafty Green Poet said...

Houses do speak, when everything else is silent (or when it gets very windy).

Your mention of the ants reminds me of the tiny ants that used to wander through the kitchen when i lived in Malawi. We wanted to get rid of them, until we noticed that they appeared to 'kiss' each other every time they passed, then we decided we would just let them be.

The large soldier ants that invaded were another matter, but in that case we knew we were just in their way as they went from A to B and after three days they stopped.