The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
Emily Dickinson
Most of a writer’s life is spent in solitude. Inviting potential friends into this solitude feels like a natural response to the restrictions of the past two years. I will hope to hear from readers & particularly from fellow writers. If you have questions, or observations & commentary, I would be interested in these & will try to reply as often as I can.
I am intrigued by the background to others’ work & so will assume that there is some interest in the background of my own. I’d once noted that, when writers ask one another, “What is your writing schedule?” they are really asking, “Are you as crazy as I am?” We all seek some clues to the mystery of personality—our own, & others’.
As Emily Dickinson observed, the Soul thrives in solitude; yet, the poet is eager to reach out to others:
I’m Nobody—Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?
In this first posting I want to include a poem from “Home: A Celebration” edited by Charlotte Moss, a beautifully produced art book published in 2021 by Rizzoli with profits designated for “No Kid Hungry” (Share Our Strength); the project itself pays homage to “The Book of the Homeless” (1916), an anthology of essays, poems, artworks, & musical scores assembled by Edith Wharton to help raise funds for children orphaned by World War I, with an introduction by Theodore Roosevelt.
Most of the contributions to “Home: A Celebration” are by visual artists & designers: contributors include Annie Leibovitz, Chipp Kidd, Claudia Weill, Irving Penn, Doug Meyer, William Abranowicz. My contribution is one of the few poems in the book, an elegy for the loss of “home” in the aftermath of the loss of a husband, a depiction of the stunned realization that “home” is an emotional/ spiritual mystery that can inhabit a place—a “house”; when “home” is subtracted from “house,” the result is an emptiness, yet a haunting: “how HOUSE is haunted by HOME.”
Since my poem has appeared in just this single place, in a compendium of others’ work, & since it is not likely that I will ever bring together enough poems for a new book—(“American Melancholy,” 2021, was my first collection of poems in 25 years & it is only reasonable to suppose that there will not be another)—it seemed appropriate for me to present the poem here, in the hope that a few readers might discover it who would not otherwise have encountered it. (But I hope readers will purchase “Home: A Celebration.” )
Poetry can be joyous & ecstatic, poetry can be light-hearted, subversive, playful & silly; but much of poetry is meditative, contemplative, brooding, somber. If you have experienced the abrupt subtraction of “home” from a house, in the aftermath of the death of a close companion, perhaps you will find something in these stanzas that will resonate with you.
Let me know in the comments.
Joyce
HOUSE HOME HOUSE
Joyce Carol Oates
HOUSE is the labyrinth at the center of which HOME is secreted.
HOUSE is visible from a distance, HOME is the invisible within.
HOUSE is emptiness waiting to be filled by HOME.
HOUSE contains HOME but is not identical with HOME.
HOUSE darkens as the sun wanes. HOME brightens with interior lights.
HOUSE is body, HOME indwelling spirit.
HOUSE FOR SALE is a frequent sign. HOME FOR SALE, never.
HOUSE has a market price. HOME, never.
HOUSE is measurements, HOME immeasurable.
HOUSE is an entity in three dimensions: brick, mortar, redwood, glass, shingleboard, poured concrete. HOME is breath.
Many HOUSES. A single HOME.
HOUSES, interchangeable. HOMES, never.
HOUSE is the place where memories are secreted. HOME is memories.
HOME, happiness of HOUSE.
HOME, soul of HOUSE.
HOME is the uplifted face, joy in kissing in foolish happiness and being kissed.
HOME is soft-falling snow, HOUSE is shelter beneath the snow.
Across 5,000 miles, HOME exerts its unerring spell.
HOUSE has too many rooms, no one has counted them. HOME is a single room dazzled by light.
HOUSE echoes with emptiness. HOME with voices.
On shelves of the HOUSE, accumulations of HOME.
HOME is the music, HOUSE the instrument upon which music is possible.
Where cats nap luxuriant in a patch of sunshine on a carpet, that is HOME.
Where the beloved is, that is HOME.
Where the beloved is no longer, that is HOUSE.
For HOUSE will prevail after HOME has vanished as the scattered bones of a singular skeleton will prevail in the chaos of soil.
HOME is the place where the ashes of the dead accumulate.
HOME is the place where, when you seek him, the husband lifts his face to be kissed.
HOME is what you seek when you enter HOUSE making your anxious way through the rooms.
Hello? Where are you?—a cry echoes through the rooms.
It’s me. I’m home. Darling? Where are you?
HOUSE never dreams. HOME is dreams.
The place where the bereft drift like ghosts seeking ghosts, that is HOME.
The place where shelves of books have commingled, that is HOME.
Where HOME has departed, HOUSE remains.
In the HOUSE, HOME is shrinking. Each day an earlier dusk. One by one windows are shuttered. Rooms are shut off.
How fragile, HOME. For HOUSE will outlive HOME.
Hurrying upstairs in the HOUSE, astonished to see that the husband’s bedroom is empty.
From no window of the HOUSE is the husband visible outside. Yet, you move eagerly from one window to another.
Because the husband is in none of the rooms of HOME, the husband abides everywhere and anywhere.
HOME is closets in which the clothes of the beloved dead hang in readiness for their return.
As HOME fades from HOUSE, a stark beauty emerges.
HOME is lost to you, you will become a wanderer.
You will think—But what has happened to me? Is this what I have become?
His being has expanded to fit all of the universe.
Where there is no boundary, the center is everywhere.
This place where he was, a place that (once) contained him, now not HOME but a memory of HOME.
I have failed you as a husband, by dying.
If HOUSE could dream, HOUSE would dream HOME.
Where was is, is once was.
HOME was, HOUSE is.
Since the vanishing of the husband HOME has begun to fade.
HOME is where, in his closets, nothing will be altered.
Hurrying into the husband’s study to greet him with a kiss but halted midway like a doe shot in mid-leap for the room is (still) empty...
Mystery here that the worn leather chair so many years occupied is empty…
How HOUSE is haunted by HOME.
How HOUSE is rooms, walls, floors and ceilings, staircases, windows from which HOME has faded.
Bright sunlight, mists, pelting rain, lightly falling snow—mistakenly believed to be, because now, permanent.
Warmth has departed from his hands, like his old strength. Yet these are his hands, eagerly you seize them.
Begging the husband—I don’t want to live without you.
The rebuke of the husband—If you love me, you will outlive me.
HOME is the place of memory. Soon, all that will remain of HOME will be memory.
How silent, HOUSE! No vocabulary.
In the HOUSE, rooms that cannot be entered.
Where the dead abide soft-crackling underfoot like the husks of winged insects, that is HOME.
Where no new snapshots will be thumb-tacked to the cork bulletin board, that is HOME.
HOME that is lost, is lost forever.
Not a ferocious gale, a slow leak like air from a failing lung.
Since the husband has departed the husband can be anywhere. The husband can be everywhere. The husband has said—The human brain is infinite. Only where we inhabit is finite.
So happy to see you on this platform, so much more hospitable for thoughts/writing than Twitter — is it a coincidence your first entry is about "home"?
Your poem brought to mind the Lao Tzu chapter about the meaning of "spaces":
The uses of not
Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.
Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.
Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t,
there’s room for you.
So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.
(from Ursula K. Le Guin's version of Tao Te Ching)
Thanks for sharing this.
Randy
*Warmth has departed from his hands, like his old strength. Yet these are his hands, eagerly you seize them.*
*Begging the husband—I don’t want to live without you.*
*The rebuke of the husband—If you love me, you will outlive me.*
These words bring tears and a lesson. Thank you.