Building A Home And Writing Poetry

A poem about stacking lines of poetry and logs to build a life

Made Things

“It is something to be able to …make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look… ”-Emerson

Hold up the windows while he nails them off,

then go back to your room and get to work:

words bloom into rhubarb and raspberries,

harvest them at their brightest, and make pie.

Home is poems, sugar, flour, and a dab of vanilla.

Your mother will run across the page —

you can’t stop her, but write life different:

the smell of wood chips and dough is on your syntax.

Your husband stacks logs, chinks, seals, and is ravenous.

Warm leftovers for lunch and praise the wood walls.

Then, after the break, tow a 1500 gallon septic tank.

Up the hill, into the woods, down the driveway —

you’d rather be writing.

But you’d rather not track to the outhouse each morning.

In your absence, the letters do push-ups on your desk —

are they strong enough to march in villanelle formation?

Do they make sense? Do they have soul?

Do they smell like moose stew and sourdough bread?

Do they sound like the husband and grinder making the front steps?

You sit in your office with ear muffs: this can be done,

this is the life you bargained for, and you traded up after all.

The kitchen cupboards are full, the bookshelves are cracking:

I do not see why I should e’er turn back.

Into your own, into snowy evenings and dark woods,

and a stove burning crumpled drafts of last year’s diction.

The poems are unfinished. The house is unfinished.

But the kitchen is all hot buttered rum and apple cider.

This is home. Come on in.

*It’s a little bit of a stretch to say I helped “build” the house. I held down a job and went to graduate school, fed my husband, and did non-technical building things. This was the home we brought our babies to, and my heart still pangs when I drive by. It’s now an outdoor preschool!

For National Poetry Month I’m sharing some of my older poems.

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