The Ruined House

Deep in the woods, beyond the shuffle

of our works and days, we found a path

between an alley of Norwegian pines.

The children ran on spongy needles,

disappearing in the purple shade;

their shouts were lost among the bird-yip:

tremolo of wood-doves, long diphthong

of redwing blackbirds, crass old crows

all harping on the same old note again.

Your hand in mine, we seemed to drift upon

a fuzzy cumulous of half-voiced thoughts:

the tongue’s quick shuttle through the loom of mind

in search of texture, text to sing,

recitativo of a thousand glimpses

caught, composed. All along the way

the eye sought gleanings, images to tell,

to cast one’s thoughts on, fix the swell

of meaning in the cross-haired sights

of metaphor, a trope to end all troping:

words and things in pure performance.

Now the hilly path went straightaway ahead,

unfolding with the ease of morning vision.

As they would, the children found it first:

the ruined house on what was once

a breezy hillock in an open field.

The course foundation might have been

a dry stone wall like other walls

now winding over hills, down dingly dells,

to parse the complex sentence of our past,

delineating fields no longer found,

obscured by popple, tamarack and vetch.

The rock foundation of the house in ruins

wasn’t stern or morally suggestive.

It had just withstood what it could stand—

the falling stars, the tumbledown of snow,

sharp dislocations of the frosty ground,

the weight of timber soaking in the rain.

We stepped inside behind the children,

who were walking beams like tightrope wires

across a corridor that once led somewhere

warm, familial, and full of light.

The cellar hole was still a hutch of night:

one saw it through the intermittent floorboards

and the two-by-fours exposed like vertebrae

that once held everything in place

but powdered now and sagged toward the middle

as the woodmites fed and moisture softened

grainy fibers, as the mulch of days

began in earnest. There was still a roof

aloft amid the trees, a fragile shade

with patches that were open into sky.

The children clambered up a tilting stairwell

to the second floor; we followed suit,

though not so fearlessly and free

of old conceptions—hurtful images

that hold one back, making one wish

for something less or something more.

The little bedrooms that we found upstairs

were still intact, with built-in beds,

coarse empty shelves still half considering

the weight of objects from their rumored past.

If one stood still and listened close

the voices of the children could be heard,

their laughter in the leaves, the sass and chatter.

Anyway, that’s what I told the children,

who believed and listened and could hear.

It’s not so hard to frame the past

upon the present, to connect the dots

all still in place, to resurrect and ride

ancestral voices: there is one great tongue.

We find ourselves alive in that old mouth,

through which all meaning flows to sea.

We pour and pour the waters of our lives,

a glittery cascade, its brightness falling

into pools where it must darken once again,

must soak in soil, collect and gather

in a place to tap for future soundings.

Later, in the shade behind the house,

we lingered in the garden’s dense enclosure.

Petal-snow of spring once happened there,

the hard ground turned, the stumps uprooted.

Beans and flowers were assigned to rows.

While he would work the upper pasture,

she was left alone sometimes in summer

and would sit there safely in the chestnut shade

to read the Brownings, he and she,

as children napped or slaughtered dragons

with their makeshift swords. That’s how the idyll

runs, of course. The typhus and the cold

that cracked the windowpanes in mid-November

and the bitter words: these, too, were true.

We left on hushing feet like thieves

with something in our pockets, awed and fragile.

It was only time that turned those pages,

leaving dust in sunlight on the stairs,

disfiguring the walls that once would keep

a family aloft through hazy fall

and hardy winter into sopping spring.

It was only time that would not stop,

that bore us homeward on the needle path

toward the end of what was ours

a while that summer in the leafy woods.