The Weather of Houses
I have never lived in
my dream house.
Strange that I never
dream of where I live.
Always elsewhere,
my dream houses,
hovering in the fabled past
or speculative future.
Dreaming about the houses
of my grandparents,
I wander through my
father’s mother’s house,
grander than the small
weathered farmhouse of
my maternal grandparents,
where wind and lizards got in,
and more mysterious,
with secrets slithering
behind ebony doors with
heart-shaped keyholes.
Broken by Depression and
kidney failure, my grandfather
passed before I met him.
His spirit hovers there still,
in a dark closet or up the chimney.
The house was torn down years ago.
I dreamed of a woodland castle,
cloistered, uninhabited, gothic,
spiral staircases to nowhere,
sibilantly curving passageways,
topless libraries locked behind
glass, haunted corners,
like Henry James’ jolly one.
On a good night, my friend dreams
good house dreams, her favorite
an elegant Mediterranean villa
with a courtyard by the sea.
In nightmares, she is unhoused,
cast into a derelict, claustrophobic
asylum or raggedly wandering a
ravaged landscape, pushing an
empty, rusting cart, trailing after
remnants of shelter.
The chronically unhoused–
grocery carts spilling over
with ephemera,
descendants of nomadic tribes
who brazenly wander the earth
as if it is their own.
Do they dream of houses, of shelter,
of the open road?
Do they dream of weather?
I do not recall dreaming of rain,
even though I live in a rainy climate.
The weather of dreams seems less
encroaching, less immersive.
Interior weather—
the weather of houses,
the climatology of mind,
suffused by a low-lying
lunar sun.
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Kathryn Lasseter is a retired college professor, now living in Oregon. She has published in Heimat Review and has poems forthcoming in BarBar.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 