I guess all I'm saying is that everybody has--
as well as all the poetry that you sort of inherit
from Baudelaire or Wordsworth or whoever,
there is the poetry of your own actual life.
And for me, I look at a kind of lower class, middle class,
lower middle class, whatever neighborhood
with artificial brick in a candy store and triple-decker houses,
and it's like Wordsworth looking at a lake.
Something then he goes, oh.
It does-- that it has some significance.
"House Hour."
Now the pale honey of a kitchen light
burns at an upstairs window, the sash across.
Milky daylight moon, sky scored by phone lines.
Houses in rows patient as cows.
Dormers and gables of an immigrant street
in a small city, the wind-worn afternoon shading into night.
Hundreds of times before I have felt it
in some district of shingle and downspout at just this hour.
The renter walking home from the bus carrying a crisp bag.
Maybe a store visible at the corner, neon at dusk.
Macaroni mist on the glass.
Unwilled, seductive as music, brief as dusk
itself, the forgotten mirror brushed for dozens of years
by the same gray light, the same shadows of soffit and beam end,
a reef of old snow glowing along the walk.
If I am hollow, or if I am heavy with longing, the same--
the same ponderous houses of siding,
fur framing, horsehair plaster, fired bricks
in a certain light, changing nothing,
but touching those separate hours of the past
and now at this one time of day touching this one,
last spokes of light silvering the attic dust.