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American Ready Cut System Houses by Heather Derr-Smith
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About This Poem “One morning, in a strange city for a conference, I went out for a walk to get
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December 19, 2016
[American Ready Cut System Houses]
[Heather Derr-Smith]
Your postcard said, Nothing like a little disaster to sort things out.
Blueprints, sketches, such perfect houses in the photograph on the front,
all the lines true and in harmony. I took it with me like a paper charm,
searching for home, hit the road, looking for the exact spot
of my birthright, down the rustling path of thistles and nettles,
under a leaden sky, in the place where God once lifted the home by its hair,
nothing left but the kitchen and the bathtub where we all hid. The supper table
picked up and carried to the county over and laid so gently down.
When I saw you last in the bar in Brooklyn, you told me to sing. But I couldnât
even speak. I laid my head in your lap, drunk at two am and felt your hand
resting across my back, reluctant, unsure of what I wanted, but knowing
it was a want too much for anyone to give in to, a halter
broke, some rip.
The skeletons of the trees are coming back to life now, sap like stars
risen again. Most anything torn can be mended. No real permanent damage.
The land where the house was
goes back to the plum-colored dusk, hooks and hoods of the hawks
perching in the Hemlocks, clouds and mounds of nebulae in the sky in the pitch night.
Frank Lloyd Wright said, nature will never fail you, though, I suppose it depends
on what you mean by fail. Itâll kill you for sure, Great Revelator.
You can hear the wilderness ad-libbing its prayers in the whip-poor-will and the cypress,
in the percussion and boom of bittern in the bulrushes.
Dead is the mandible, alive the song, wrote Nabokov.
The bones of our houses, the house of our bones
dropped in a sudden blur of wind and wings,
but our voices still throb and palpitate somewhere, by some rapture,
in memoryâs ear, in the fluttering pages, behind the stars.
I have a song now I want to sing to you, but youâre long gone.
When you said Iâm here for you, was that a promise?
Overwhelm,
to bury or drown beneath a huge mass
Whelmen: to turn upside down
To turn over and over like a boat washed over and overset by a wave
To bring to ruin.
The end of one part of the world, a story that no longer has a witness.
But Iâll sing it to myself. Iâll sing it to the small moth,
the size of scarcely a word,
Ad libitum, according to my desire.
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Copyright © 2016 Heather Derr-Smith. Used with permission of the author.
[illustration]
About This Poem
âOne morning, in a strange city for a conference, I went out for a walk to get coffee and a man followed me and threatened to kill me. Back at the hotel, shaken and trying to catch my breath, I saw a stranger who I had met the night before who had been very kind and I went to sit beside him, drawn to some kind of shelter. We developed a friendship and correspondence, which led to many of the poems in Thrust about how we encounter others authentically, how we long to know one another and be known, and how we find the courage to remain open in spite of the danger and risk.â
âHeather Derr-Smith
Heather Derr-Smith is the author of Tongue Screw (Spark Wheel Press, 2016). Her fourth collection, Thrust, was the winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editorâs Choice Award from Persea Books and will be published in 2017. She lives in Iowa.
Photo credit: Jen McClung
Poetry by Derr-Smith
[Tongue Screw]
(Sparkle Wheel Press, 2016)
"The Letter" by Mary Ruefle
[read-more]
"The Steam Engine" by Elizabeth Willis
[read-more]
"The Symbolical Head (1883) as When Was the Last Time?" by Kathryn Nuernberger
[read-more]
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