Dream House

Dream House

The house is a memory.
He  built it and thought,
“This is where I'm going to die,
Where I can smell the sea
and live in my dream each day.”
He made it from old plans which he perfected
with a casted arm he'd twisted
and a mechanic he'd fired
and a wasted silence
more than ruining a week's vacation;
with stolen German army boots
and a black eye,
and a stinking brother's secret
and a broken racing cart;
with a kind girl's shaking, bobbing hair
and the breath of a deadbeat uncle
who lived in the living room
and shot rockets on Sundays.

Written in pencil in his carpenter’s manual:
“To build a house,
discard unused materials.”
There they all were,
the slag, the black mud,
the stripped bolts and half-rotted floorboards,
the foundation of dust.

In new blades of the sea-fed
blue-green lawn
In the skylights and burnt ceilings
In bleached wood and white breezes

There in the empty new house
they echoed,
“What else? What else?”