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Vagueness has vernacular charm.
—Guy Davenport
We inhabit our own history as we inhabit
houses built by others,
but call our own. To read a life backwards
is to step into rooms familiar
and uneasy. The sharp turn of a grandmother’s smile
in the mirror, or the same crooked nose
scattered among faces in curling photographs. Hands
now clenched in pockets of atonement.
Stories of a house, some unbearable, weaken the beams
if ignored. The land, too, furrows with legacy’s
rotting bones. Old boards moan the ambitions of ancestors, nails
leach from beams like reminders, strange hairs
fossilize deep in the floor’s varnish. Blueprints: dreams
of descendents built from the truth ineradicable narratives
already written. Some rejoice in their glory. Others
collapse from the weight of their sentence
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