NO PLACE LIKE HOME

             (an old-fashioned dialogue between Self and Soul)

 

 

SELF  (alto voice):

 

            Lucky traveler, romanced by the road,

            the old home can’t get me with its load

                        of traps for a garden, stinking nets

 

            spread across the threshold: hard abode,

            petrified by bitter mist, bowed

                        like wood bleached by flood, set

 

            down like salted bones.  At least, I’m told

            one house, mean and cheap, stays on the cold

                        market for a housewife yet.

 

 

CHORUS:

 

            One day, a half century later, dressed

            in rags and leaning on a stick, distressed

                        soul returns disguised as a crone

 

            and finds the highway come to the house, pressed

            against that driftwood pitched on shingle, now messed

                        by fumes, tormented by crossroad’s groan.

 

            And the spirit sang as jaws of death ingressed

            to shear away the face, monstrous guest,

                        and leave a dollhouse or geode stone,

 

            split to bare its passages to flow

            of traffic, its hearths and scenes of private woe,

                        its thresholds crossed by proud brides.

 

 

SOUL (treble voice):

 

            Rooms that holding birth and death would know,

            can count the loves and selves lost by cockcrow,

                        won by nightfall.  Because of tides

 

            that guide our times, row or mow or sew,

            sticks and rags are our lives, and tiny clothes

                        in the attic.  You who left its side

 

            are part of its story along with those who died.

            It is good to live in a house, long long to bide

                        its time.  The grizzled children know

 

            it will be there always, if laid low

            to be dismantled by loving hands as slow

                        work of nature might have done,

 

            not perish in obscurity.  As one

            might say it, “Since our time began to run,

                        we’ve always lived at The Landing, though

 

            we had to rebuild.”

 

 

SELF AND SOUL (duet):

 

                                              Who are they to blow

            away the rock wrought those years ago

                        by fire and ice and crush the pride

 

            of a neighborhood that grew like flocks that ride

            the civil air together, packs that stride

                        ancestral freeholds?  Hand of Hun,

 

            come out of nowhere as wheel of fortune spun,

            set plastic mammoth down on asphalt plain to stun

                        the soul, undifferentiated

 

death, deformed organ to incubate

            ‘non-natural persons.’  Those who stay and wait

                        are homesick for where they are, and those

 

            who left now come from nowhere.  To this gross

            rebirth, can one bring a spirit?  Close

                        by fieldlark’s fluid tongue, will still

 

            she find a holy voice to bless, distill

            her rainbow rain, sifting crystal spills

                        of sound over this black hole’s gravity?