House on Fire By Jay Parini

My house on fire in the midday sun

is more than I can watch.

My kindling sons, their fragile bodies,

turn to light.

My wife is lost in auguries of rain.

I take her hand, it turns to wind.

Dry grass is blazing on a windy knob

just out of sight,

as rats take cover in the distant barns.

The woodchucks dig.

The sheep and rocks are huddling in the fields.

My books are curling in the fiery tongues

that want this babble,

that would eat a house so finely cobbled

stone by stone, my house of paper,

flesh and words,

so easily become this fly-ash, bonemeal,

dust of language sucked and blown.

From “House of Days” by Jay Parini

(Owl Books / Henry Holt: 86 pp., $13 paper)