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Variations on Place (excerpt)

Today's poem is an excerpt from Variations on Place by Noel Tague. It is read by Julia Bouwsma.

Variations on Place (excerpt)

I close my eyes
and recite my way through

the house like a Roman
in a memory palace.

The house feels like it is waiting
for its ghost and I

oblige, the haunting reciprocal.
I let the golden light of pine

floorboards fill me, lay
in all the beds,

look through sheer curtains
at the hemlocks

whose long arms meet
in prayer above the river.

It is always dusk here.
I conjure the Victorian

sconces in the bedrooms,
which lay deep

in darkness
when I was a child. Small

terror, rushing into the realm
of monsters, hand grasping

for the lamp's square
switch. My own children

will never know the place,
its dreams and phantoms. A house

frequently inhabited inscribes
habits of movement on the body:

the child in me,
reaching in the dark.

The parts of me
that went down with the eaves.