The House
1. Foundation
Start with finding the animal—
“His vision, from the constantly passing bars”
not that you know what to do
with Rilke’s panther in your socket
not that it mortars loss, I cannot like the house
for pushing on the bed
of knowledge
(absolutely, fuck me jesus)
saying
earth mother, set the stake here.
2. The movement of plates
Tell me nothing is a sign,
tell me nothing’s hiding in the barn with the bad uncles
and the bale of it
and fenced seedbed,
stones skipped across fissures.
Memory,
do I righteous garden—
3. Power and light
Emergence from leaf litter
(pandemic winter,
narcissus flashes,
house riot,
her funeral)
leases form
to solace
expansion
while schooling
form in friction
and how
buttress
the pearl of it
swags
assemblage
to be a village
transmuting matter
as in a drawing of.
4. The fence
She was a book club member, so I begged for a book to read:
“Tell me if it has profanity in it.”
Cow-repelling bridge, be careful of its rungs—
understory snagged on the particulars
of skirting the meadow
or stepping over the vaginal flowers.
Indeed, toeing the piled-up stones to cross,
do not cut the wire
you’re straddling.
5. Parking
for want of an offering * lost virgin beach * presence
makes no sound * broken bottles, shell fragments *
sea wall * boardwalk gap * broken
stair * pantheism, or panentheism * ghost
traces * white paper * far-off train *
horizon objects * upcycling *
a woman’s black eye * tin pail *
wound salt * inquiry *
in your mother’s ear *
beaded necklace *
dune grass
6. Clerestory
Housing constructed of stirred sand—
if a rent in animal hide invented
the camera obscura—
to trip the fallen columns
saying I must take this sea glass with me
for a window
inside the real
worries grinding
after stone,
recall your grandparents’ friend gave you
an oyster shell
for making
lace of—
7. Coma Berenices
What stars represent
is nothing that you think
except the roof be open
and the looking-house pierced—
Berenice combs her hair for the last time
before cutting it to ensure Ptolemy’s return
or a nighthawk drinks from a pool in the
Y of a tree
where the snag is being
(a trapeze catches light)
8. Balustrade
would have it
spiral arms
and in the making
you will not unmake
truth’s
body
)
so it might
live all night
(
“to shape it and bring it up
is tricky”
9. Cystallography and blueprint
The parable of the salt: in a process called sinking,
my beloved smiths a tiny copper bowl—
smith, smith, smith
“do the aligning atoms”
erect shelter, asks Lot’s wife,
my salt pillar cleaning the lint cache—
Dreamwork in human calories,
the antler has twelve points
stairing up and down
you had no ink
the spacious of, the levels, the landings
and how
longing for the views
afterward
the deer looks at you
10. Shoring up
is to say elegy’s wooden stairs
on toe slippers
and the roof angle
shall link their forms
breathing out
pelagic spells.
Honestly,
the ocean’s over-qualified
says the film
and grief
is the maker.
11. What is the grass
as in the parapet’s gravity
surrender
is what
even a large animal is
the shape of
going under
bare dirt, beneath the sycamore
12. Instead of impatiens looking machine-made
Patience scaffold,
to rock garden
the beholder settles
in the shape of a container
succulent thorns, shell games, beardtongue volunteers
to meet the breathing under-need’s
home address— intake candle—
dirt, beneath the sycamore
(although my mother loved them for their easy color—
