from Findings

THE DESIGN OF A HOUSE

      1.

      Except in idea, perfection is as wild

      as light; there is no hand laid on it.

      But the house is a shambles unless

      the vision of its perfection

      upholds it like stone.

      More probable: the ideal

      of its destruction:

      cloud of fire prefiguring

      its disappearance.

      What value there is

      is assumed;

      like a god, the house elects its omens;

      because it is, I desire it should be

      —white, its life intact in it,

      among trees.

      Love has conceived a house,

      and out of its labor

      brought forth its likeness

      —the emblem of desire, continuing

      though the flesh falls away.

      2.

      We’ve come round again

      to short days and long nights;

      time goes;

      the clocks barely keep up;

      a spare dream of summer

      is kept

      alive in the house:

      the Queen Anne’s lace

      —gobletted,

      green beginning to bloom,

      tufted, upfurling—

      unfolding

      whiteness:

      in this winter’s memory

      more clear than ever in summer,

      cold paring away excess:

      the single blooming random

      in the summer’s abundance

      of its kind, in high relief

      above the clover and grass

      of the field, unstill

      an instant,

      the day having come upon it,

      green and white

      in as much light as ever was.

      Opened, white, at the solstice

      of its becoming, then the flower

      forgets its growing;

      is still;

      dirt is its paradigm—

      and this memory’s seeing,

      a cold wind keening the outline.

      3.

      Winter nights the house sleeps,

      a dry seedhead in the snow

      falling and fallen, the white

      and dark and depth of it, continuing

      slow impact of silence.

      The dark

      rooms hold our heads on pillows, waiting

      day, through the snow falling and fallen

      in the darkness between inconsecutive

      dreams. The brain burrows in its earth

      and sleeps,

      trusting dawn, though the sun’s

      light is a light without precedent, never

      proved ahead of its coming, waited for

      by the law that hope has made it.

      4.

      What do you intend?

      Drink blood

      and speak, old ghosts. I don’t

      hear you. What has it amounted to

      —the unnegotiable accumulation

      of your tears? Your expenditure

      has purchased no reprieve. Your

      failed wisdom shards among the

      down-going atoms of the moment.

      History goes blind and in darkness,

      neither sees nor is seen, nor is

      known except as a carrion

      marked with unintelligible wounds;

      dragging its dead body, living,

      yet to be born, it moves heavily

      to its glories. It tramples

      the little towns, forgets their names.

      5.

      If reason were all, reason

      would not exist—the will

      to reason accounts for it;

      it’s not reason that chooses

      to live; the seed doesn’t swell

      in its husk by reason, but loves

      itself, obeys light which is

      its own thought and argues the leaf

      in secret; love articulates

      the choice of life in fact; life

      chooses life because it is

      alive; what lives didn’t begin dead,

      nor sun’s fire commence in ember.

      Love foresees a jointure

      composing a house, a marriage

      of contraries, compendium

      of opposites in equilibrium.

      This morning the sun

      came up before the moon set;

      shadows were stripped from the house

      like burnt rags, the sky turning

      blue behind the clear moon,

      day and night moving to day.

      Let severances be as dividing

      budleaves around the flower

      —woman and child enfolded, chosen.

      It’s a dying begun, not lightly,

      the taking up of this love

      whose legacy is its death.

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