Monday, September 6, 2010

Use the House Against Itself

Use the House Against Itself

Smash the dishes in their shelves.
Take a shovel to the oven, the windows.
Rifle glasses at the ceiling. Rip handfuls

of blinds from the wall. Fling forks
into the walls like darts, and hang
from the blades of the fan until

they snap off. Use the house against
itself, level the place. Unbury every
covered thing, even the mud

beneath the floorboards. Pull the bricks
from the wall to see how they land.
Wreck the house. Rebuild it into rubble.

6 comments

  1. There is so much I love in this. All the action. The motion, the intensity. Wow, HS. Just wow.

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  2. Quite a poem! "Rebuild it into rubble" adds a twist.

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  3. Wow! I didn't know I felt this way, in this moment, until I read it. Thank you. It was cathartic. Now, how do I rebuild from the rubble? "Unbury every covered thing" is, I think, the heart of this poem.

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  4. Fascinating poem! Reading it did feel cathartic, as well as secretly violent. Sometimes it's good to break things down.

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  5. This vividly dramatizes the abstract noun of "de-construction"!

    I read this powerful poem. I think:
    Civil War
    "friendly fire"
    tornado, hurricane, earthquake
    the implosion of a family, ideal, nation

    It also has echoes of Biblical temples: their raising and then their destruction. Or, maybe it's not as heavy as that? Maybe it's a kind of Revenge of Home Depot?

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