Love Poems to Things

Suburban House -  Sidewalk, lamppost, driveway, stoop. What appeals to me, walking by the curb?  It is you, suburban house.  Set amid your landscape monopoly, behind portico and bay window obscured by drapes, the mystery of how you fill your square footage beckons.  Locus of homemaking, shared address, proletarian palace, how could freedom be any freer than it is behind your façade?  Where goes your stone path?  What patio skirts you; what shed or outbuilding attends you; what yard art adorns your shrubbery?  Twilight falls.  Exterior yearnings yield to interior hermitage. What nourishing smells assault the senses from the cauldrons heated by your appliances, what fragrant artifacts line your cupboards, closets and cabinets? What mundane transpirings does your inner golden glow illuminate?  A robot could design you; only a primate troop could animate you.   

Roadside Pine Grove on a Curve - It's such a long way to the sea, that I wonder why I ever go.  When I get there I know, but the way back is so long and the road so dark that I wonder why I ever leave.  And then, when I have counted down the miles and the byway at last rounds down to the highway that will lead after a while to home, don't think that I don't see you in my excessive haste, roadside grove on the outside curve.  Your elegant array just beyond the shoulder, your members at road's edge like sentinels daunting entry to your forest, your unpeopled collectiveness receding into the enchanted blackness of night-- anomalous orderly wilderness.  I only see you in a blur when I am readiest to be home, but for that moment you remind me why I ache to wander.   

Saturday Afternoon - To the left of you is the week before. To the right of you is the week to come. Only you, deep mid Saturday afternoon endure in unactualized completeness.  While I accede to the chore I chose to spend you on, dreaming of the undetermined treat to come that I have in mind to give myself for not just lolling in you in my dreamy sloth, you seem to fleet forever.

Decay - Spring returns and green encroaches everywhere without relent.  Life burgeons like an alien invasion from every corner except yours, decaying structure.  Life abounds, expands, fills and conquers yet you wither, lifeless, neglected, defeated architecture.  Caving in on yourself in slow motion, you are the sister of the moth who came to its end trapped in a web beside your door, who once shook and strove, saying, "This too is life!" until in tatters it shakes no more except in bursts of wind.  Life insists, but you dead brown house, resist.  Your  deliberate return to nothingness--visible, beautiful, passively defiant-- is a relief.

Pegboard - Someone needed a room in the garage that they couldn't afford, so they nailed you, Pegboard, to some pine beams, and called you a wall.  Then they hinged a section of you, bolted a $2.50 cabinet handle to you and called you a door.  Hiding and seeking one day in youth, you called out to me and I popped you out of your latch, slipped through you into the dappled windowless darkness that you enclosed and pulled you quietly shut.  Then I sat amid the storage, waiting in the pinholes of light to be sought.