Has canary-yellow curtains, so expensive
At certain times they become unaffordable,
Cost too much patience. A cartoon voice:
‘I’m leaving, Elmer.’ That’s home also, sometimes;
The Eden a person can’t go back to. Still…
If you don’t leave it, it’s only a world;
If you never return, just a place like any other.
Home isn’t in the Blue Guide, the A–Z
I only need for those ten thousand streets
Not one of which has Alice Wales in it.
At home you bolt on the new pine headboard,
Crying. You build from your tears
A hydroponicum; bitter-sweet nutrition
Becomes the address we ripen in like fruit
No one thought would grow here. Home
Is where we hang up our clothes and surnames
Without thought. Home is the instruction: dream
home.
An architecture of faint clicks, and smells that
haven’t yet quite.
We grow old in it. Like children, it keeps us young,
Every evening being twenty-one again
With the key in the door, coming back from the
library
You’re shouting upstairs to me, telling me what
you are
In the simplest of words, that I want you to go on
repeating
Like a call-sign. You are shouting, ‘I’m home.’