Our House

by Elizabeth Eastman

She wore only white and hid her poems in a dresser drawer tied into bundles with satin ribbon. Her house was a sanctuary she could scarcely leave. She, too, had a lover.

I think that I shall not wear white when I come to stay, but lilac or evergreen or daffodil to catch your eye. It’s not that I’m vain and want to become brushtrokes on your canvas or pose in a gilt frame over the mantle. I simply want to sit in the afternoon shade looking at you looking at me.

We’ll find a country house, nothing fancy, dressed up a bit with sweet peas and ivy. A sturdy framework, clapboard worn smooth like sea-washed stones, a red tin roof to keep away the summer storms. Although I do not like cats, we’ll have a Siamese to chase away the critters. I will give her milk in a blue and white saucer I’ll keep in the glass-paned cupboard painted like buttercups.

Ours will be a house of words, armfuls pressed like leaves between leather and paper on homemade shelves of maple and pine. As our days increase, your gestures will become as familiar as a cherished memento; how you reach for a favorite verse but stop to touch the wood you planed yourself; how you move your hands across the small of my back and gather me up like a sheaf of wheat trembling in the wind.

If we quarrel, as lovers do, I will play a nocturne and then another and perhaps some scales until I hear your step upon the porch. I will taste the rain on your lips, the salt on your cheeks. “You’re home,” I’ll whisper over and over as I breathe you in once again, my life.

My love, we will lie together on the creaky iron bed. The crickets, a solitary dormouse, will hear our love cries as I find my shelter and you find your home.

We may dream of odysseys and orphans and unfinished journeys, but they will be only dreams.

Let us take out of hiding the immortal words of the poet in white—“I am nobody,” she said of herself—and make new combinations—never to be locked away—to whisper to our babies as they slumber on your shoulder in the sun.

Where sonnets and stories end, lullabies will begin. Where melodies fail, pictures will do, cast in evening shadows and first light. Our children (they’ll be exquisite, don’t you think?) will make their own creations, piled high from floorboards to rafters, little blessings giving life to the very soul of this house, our home.

--EA
©2000 by Elizabeth Eastman

Elizabeth Eastman writes that her life in Halifax, Nova Scotia is not nearly as idyllic as her poem may make it appear, but that she does enjoy bicycling, walking her golden retriever, Mike, and making occasional visits to a friend who likes blueberry pie and Darjeeling Tea.