written for Shay’s Word Garden – Michael McClure
The previous owners left a child’s chalk dust galaxies covering the fire places. She dismantles them though, preferring flames, their bloodless hearts wrapped, gentle as love around tree tusks to burn and burn. Between adzed boards, cold air gyres and the bathroom floor is a study in experimental paint peel, like the way they grew apart such tormented ageing and so she packs her red-nailed toes around flakes, savouring the crisp snaps and the tiny pains that elevate; thundered blood. Outside, a verandah roof offers itself generously to the side-walk - the apron of a treacherous baker; fickle stripes tied in at the waist noisy in the summer where the plane tree hurls its seasonal infidelities. She spills sugar like lost time among verandah rail splinters and mint leaves. In the garden – those intense crystals spin sweetness into action – a swoop, a shriek morning’s regular symposium where colour’s genius meets the sun and it’s then she knows this house is clad with poetry its fragile stanzas daring tomorrow. She always feeds the birds because history is what you save while the termites are sleeping
Out of the Cave 
Lovely portrait of a house, a person, and time.
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Thank you!
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An amazing description of a home, so well pictured I could almost feel the paint peel flakes crackling underfoot. I love that she feeds the birds because “history is what you save.”
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Thanks Sherry! Your reading of that line is so perfect! I hadn’t even thought of it that way myself! Damn! LOL
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You give us here not just a physical dwelling, but a doubled spiritual one reflected in its mirror. Every image in this is deeply painted with the mood and color of a personality, and a larger essence of its own. I especially liked “…a study/in experimental paint peel,/like the way they grew apart..” I can see the flaking away.
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Thanks! The poem was largely inspired by photos of a real house not far from here and the person and her story grew out of the house. 🙂
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Those last half dozen lines are dynamite.
–Shay
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Thanks, Shay!
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Your poem is pure delight … ‘experimental paint peel, like the way they grew apart such tormented ageing’ made my throat close, head spin.
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thank you! lovely comment!
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lovely vignette of a house; the last five lines are stunning —
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thanks, John!
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“ because history is what you save / while the termites are sleeping” Ohhhhhh,… I wish I’d written that.
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Thank you!!
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