The House by Robin Skelton

Quoting in full and risking copyright infringement of this poem by Robin Skelton. It opens In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton edited by Harold Rhenisch. Very fitting for the beginning. It is entitled “The House”

This is the house
in which the words

are walls, are furniture,
are doors and cushions,

and in which the paintings,
chairs and rugs

are words, and all the words
stand in a circle

round the changing moment.
But when you enter,

opening the rhetoric
of the door,

seeing round you
vocabularies of sculpture,

libraries of sound,
do not assume

this is exclusively
a house of language;

think rather that it is
a place where love

has struggled to discover
what it means

and made these words
to hold you till it knows.

I was particularly taken by the “vocabularies of sculpture” and the “libraries of sound” and of course the final gesture of holding some one assumes beloved “you” in the matrix of the expressed.

And so for day 716
28.11.2008