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.