Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death.
—Campbell, Refusal of the Call
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
—Rilke
Let your houses be made of stone.
Let them reek of blue rot.
Let them sit, and remember, in agony,
The child under their doorjamb
In midsummer, orchid-wreathed,
Overdeveloped daguerreotype,
Filled to glowing with unloosed kisses.
Let your houses brim with salt, with rain,
With spiders and aching grasslands, forever noons,
With songs to reinvent spent oceans.
Somewhere the waves
Are always someone’s first. (For me, I was born
Knowing what nobody could tell me
And I would not be consoled. Not with
Blood, nor ink, not with wine, not with sweat
Of love in foreign afternoons,
On strangers’ beds, writing long left letters
Blown in from strange other lives.)
Houses, sit bone empty, weigh your wind,
Stave off collapse for our private universe only.
Houses, be a once haven for the long lost.
Shelter brothers dreaming down your ghost.
Be some hope of a heaven home reflected
In your juddered girders, your gap-tooth smile,
Bays beyond windows, beyond bays—
What? We travellers know
There is only the departing. Yes, dear Heraclitus,
The plaster walls we touched and smudged
With tiny hands
Are rivers too, and gone. We dive
And plunge them, hold jolly fast
Til press of air expels, past nostalgia,
Past illusion, past truth,
Up up now and toward the bright
Until we are free,
Now skimming surface skin, now fleeing,
Now groping hard the lie, in some indefinable fury.
But let your houses not be millstones.
Let them sink their way without you.
Let them coral up, grow sun, relent memory.
Unclench seafloors now and swim, swim, yes—
Now roofless child, now breathe green air,
Wander splay-open stars, navigate ridge
By blink of far window, beckoning
Beloved stranger,
Washed clean in lap of night,
Receding, receding, bashful, blithe.