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 Contents | April 2004 More on poetry from The Atlantic Monthly. |
House
by Billy Collins .....  Hear the author read this poem (in RealAudio)I lie in a bedroom in a house that was built in 1862, we were told— the two windows still facing east into the bright daily reveille of the sun. The early birds are chirping, and I think of those who have slept here before, the family we bought the house from— the five Hendersons— and the engineer they told us about who lived here alone before them, the one who built onto the back of the house a large glassy room with wood beams. I have an old photograph of the house in black and white, a few small trees, and a curved dirt driveway, but I do not know who lived here then. So I go back to the Civil War and to the farmer who built the house and the rough stone walls that encompass the house and run up into the woods, he who mounted his thin wife in this room, while the war raged to the south, with the strength of a dairyman or with the tenderness of a dairyman or with both, alternating back and forth so as to give his wife much pleasure and possibly to call a son down to earth to help with the cows and take over the little farm when he no longer had the strength after all the days and nights of toil and prayer— the sun breaking over the horizon and into these same windows to light the same bed-space where I lie with nothing to farm, the dead farmer and his dead wife for company, feeling better and worse by turns.
Billy Collins was the U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003. His most recent books are Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001) and Nine Horses (2003). Copyright © 2004 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; April 2004; House; Volume 293, No. 3; 54. |
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