Many-Storied House: Poems

Postgraduate Work

All of It 99 Postgraduate Work I am the one who, thirty years ago, wanted to write a dissertation on The House as the Body in the Work of Four American Women Poets. I saw then, in the joists and plumbing of poems, this primal link. I understood it with the three pounds of electric jelly that was my brain. I read, researched, proposed, was refused, and took off down another path. Now I’m back in that thorny clearing. I don’t need brains to see it. The punch to the solar plexus, the knot in the gut as I step into a house slowing down around her. It is immaterial that the cleaning lady comes once a week. Outside energy can’t travel across the placenta; she can tidy but not animate the house. Mother’s vitality kept the air alive, circulating like hot water when we had steam heat. A house is a child you carry on the outside. As you go, it goes. It’s dizzy. It can’t breathe. Can’t look sharp. Can’t get its shit together or in the pot. Can’t regulate what comes in, what goes out. Can’t fix what breaks. Can’t even find it. And I can’t tell the living from the ghosts. ...