House

I want you to know how my house was built.

Nothing had I to do with either cost or height:
Nowhere, I was first everywhere — a gleam in the pulp
Of night, a bubble in the gills of the river fish:

Nothing definite, yet infinitely more than accident;
For now inside my house, myself in every stone,
Elusive here someone surrounds me like a song:

O is it Mia, Jof, or Jesu?
Who knows? Who knows?

When I consult the trees to ask them how to breathe,

How to be water flowing, or how to worship in sleep,
I come home, and waiting there to separate my fears
Is someone in my house who names each torment at my feet:

O is it Mia, Jof, or Jesu?
Who knows? Who knows?

I want you to know the stranger in my house.

When sound from the well of night,
like a dog’s familiar bark,
Shakes my door, the call slips in quietly as a mouse;
And although nothing moves in air or empty dark,

Though earth and sky disqualify all my walls,
I know inside my clock hiding there, building a spark —
Someone who comes and stays, someone who waits and goes:

O is it Mia, Jof, or Jesu?
Who knows? Who knows?

And when awake to the sun I go and ask for faith,

All things, their faces bared, with slender hands speak to me;
But how may knowledge be reconciled with stranger in my house:
Someone who builds a church from all the properties of light?

O is it Mia, Jof, or Jesu?
Who knows? Who knows?