It is not easy to re-visit old houses.
Like old lovers, they have a way of seeming
just as you knew them, but untouchable.

To walk to this house by the children’s playground,
the factories and the yards, was once a way
of ordering the inward-tumbling weather:
housewife and scrawny child on the pocked asphalt,
the faecal-sniffing dog, became the tribes
of a country with its own language, one
that clasped my brittle vowels in a dark lump,
an argument with myself.
        For sure, a year
and a quarter tramping these corridors
was not time enough to summon all
that had to be said.

Even now I’m not sure what it meant.
I turned, without knowing why, up the stairs
to my room — the single bed, the gas stove and
Van Gogh radiant on the wall.
        That was the spring
I knew the world would change, and many times
I woke in the half-lit chilly room to feel
beyond the window and the dew-prickled yard
Time like a song heard in the early morning,
a familiar tune, the words remote as day.

(via weissewiese)