BY BRUCE MCRAE
A house shaped like a tree.
A house in the form of a stone.
A ship that’s a house.
The river-house.
House on the moon, the dark side,
its porch light on always,
attracting moths and meteors:
something to hope for
when seen from a long distance.
*
My house sings beside a ditch.
My house struggles with its conscience.
My house falls up a hill.
It’s where I live;
I go home because I’m not there.
Because I am.
Because I have to be somewhere
Because I have to be.
*
The house in my head
has eyes and legs and lips and a heart.
The mind-house is one room
inside numberless rooms;
a wooden dreamscape,
a child’s nightmare of bricks flying
and doors that won’t open.
There’s something unsayable
under the floorboards.
*
The portable house –
you can take in anywhere
and everywhere.
You can never leave or arrive.
It follows you to school, to work.
It’s hands-free.
It’s no bigger than your mouth.
Just deflate and fold
and you’re on your way.
*
In one house that I lived in
the cat was king and dog a citizen.
In one house the ghosts
took turns frightening themselves.
In another house
the furnace stayed on no matter
what we did or didn’t do.
And the mice were very intelligent –
saints to the roaches’ sinners.
*
The house is on fire, then underwater,
then invisible, then in outer space.
The house is black, then red, then purple.
The house is edgy, divine, sanguine, undone.
It has hair and teeth and principles.
A circle, it thinks it’s a square.
It’s lost its bearings.
Someone suggests: Let’s go there!
But we can’t go there.
*
The house of sod.
The house Bosch built –
doors only on the inside,
the floors up a wall,
its furnishings in people-form.
Set in its ways,
it’s the planet which is shifting.
*
Come in, you’re out.
This is the room God sent you.
Here is where we store the clouds.
That’s the closet that death was born in.
This is the hall we can’t get to.
The light enters here
then gets lost along the way.
The air decides for itself –
because we’re all free-thinkers here.
We all live somewhere else.
*
The house is abandoned now.
It seems to be (but it isn’t)
always late autumn – inside and out.
The penultimate leaf waves farewell.
A torn curtain shudders
in a last-gasp effort
to prove its existence.
The dust is barely disturbed
by the ghost-whisperers –
that handful of lonely spectres
who refuse any notice of eviction.
Like little flames, one by one
by one, they flicker out.
They can’t come to the door right now.
Try again, in the next world.
Knock louder.
AERODROME 