Three House Poems
by John Davis Jr
 
Finish Carpentry

In our heart pine handmade farm house,
my grandparents were window weights:

cast iron bars tethered in country wood,
plumb and place-holding pendulums.

Constants in the frame, their parallel
gravity stayed our panes and perspectives.

Traditional counter-heft kept us
high-open for heat, tight-sashed for cold.

When their cotton ropes tore, the bang
of their fall shook and skewed our structure.

Remodeling: springs and high-tech hydraulics
secure a new generation’s tempered glass.


Loaner Living

Everywhere we go is borrowed.
This is not our place repeated each season
maintains our perfect-guest behavior.

Awkward copy keys scrape into others’
brass pins and tumblers, grind violation
to remind us – You don’t belong to here.

Summer beach house smell: far-off cedar.
Its crooked sliding glass doors on all four sides
reek of elbow grease – pushing, pulling too hard.

Fall mountain cabin shrinks and cracks
its joints in coming cold. Foreign breaks
wake us from slumber almost like home.

Winter city condo confines
flavors of another family’s baking.
Our tongues catch cloves and nutmeg off the air.

Spring farm shack makes us dust
its wood, deep-laden in skin cells not ours
collected on rough cloth the texture of work.

Strange bed sheets’ and pantries’ must hangs
from our pores and down countenances.
Everything we have is borrowed.


On Deciding to Build a New House

Too long we have lived with elder ghosts.
We feel their urges in door knobs and drawer pulls.
We turn window latches and light switches from them.

Our desire: Fresh handles and hinges darkened
by our little rituals’ seizable legacies –
that one day the youngers might grasp our habits
and push toward their own simple levers.
We long to press spirits alone, all owned by us.