Floating Houses

The night mist leaves us yearning for a new location

to things impossibly stationary,

the way they’d once float houses

made from dismantled ships, brass and timber,

from Plymouth, Massachusetts, across the sound

to White Horse Beach. You were only a boy.

Years later, gazing out to the red buoys

of the harbor, you sought those houses, each the location

of your childhood’s end. Jon, I make this all sound

too complex. Our view of time is stationary,

a long prediction of remorse. We’re drinking in timber,

camping above Tucson, Arizona. Below, the houses

are vague points of light, describing a grief you’ve housed

since watching those buildings careen on water, a boy

too sullen for your father. So the aspens creak like timber

in an aging sloop. The others sleep. You locate

the figure of your son, small and stationary,

but tell me he’ll die young, body unsound,

a childhood diabetic. The bourbon makes you sound

entranced—to think one day you’ll return to the house

to find that you’ve outlived him, maybe the radio station

playing some popular song. Outliving the boy,

you’ll outlive yourself. Drunk, we’ve lost our location.

I shine my flashlight to find the others. The timbre

of your voice grows slack. Leaves and timber

rustle in the promise of rain, in the sound

of distant thunder that, like death, has no location.

Below, relentless clouds will cover houses.

The campfire sputters, then grows, buoyed

by wind, our bodies the only things stationary.

Because of death, our small, unstationary

lives become narration—a child is lost in timber

in a fable when night approaches. The boy

can’t even see his hands. Only owl-cry, the sound

of his heart. But soon the aspens part, the houses

of his village appear, their location

precise and consoling. He’s stationary, not a sound

from below. Beyond the timber, floating houses.

And there his papa’s lantern, a light the boy can locate.

Source: Icehouse Lights (Yale University Press, 1982)