Don Share's "At Home"

Here's Don Share's contribution to the Split This Rock series. In "At Home," Share echoes Elizabeth Bishop's "A Visit to St. Elizabeth's"--in which the poet employs "The House that Jack Built" nursery rhyme structure to capture the surreal meeting of the poet Ezra Pound in the asylum--to provide us with a comic scene of the wreck of domestic life (Ortega y Gassett: life is shipwreck). The poem suggests both the tenuousness and fragility of modern American life, and the greater fragility that appears on the doorstep, in the news of wars abroad.

At Home


Greetings to the red-eyed clouds
from this, the house that sits

on the mound and faces the corner
that marriage built, where wine

was drunk and semen flooded
the egg which lodged in the uterus

that built the daughter who greeted
the man and the woman here

in the mound at the corner in the house
that education built, and you

know from home-schooling
that the woman can be the teacher

and the man can be the tender child
and ditto the actual infant, depending

on her sex, dependent on love and
income; oh our dear dependent

is ruining the new chair in the house
that nested ambition built, along

with naked sense, and the beak
of god, the job of love, the hurt

of older homes, the hang
of it generally, the hands of pain,

the haze of Zoloft and the pudge
of Prozac, the twins of failed

marriages that manage to live on
in the ardor of our redone arbor

here in the house that books built,
that Yiddish and the Book of Common

Prayer built, that Presbyterian pride
built, that pogroms built, that blue

and white collars built, that Bildungs-
romans built, that the Biltmores built,

that mad dogs bayed at, that the baby
was born in that the cat bit and mouse

whispered within, over which, mortgaged,
the thunder caught its tongue and brought

great downpours upon while the coffee boiled,
while the paper, delivered late again, said:

We fight the terrorists abroad
so we don't have to fight them at home.

-Don Share

Used by permission.
Originally published in Squandermania
(Salt Publishing, 2007)

Don Share is Senior Editor of Poetry. His books include Squandermania; Union; and Seneca in English. Forthcoming are a new book of poems, Wishbone; a critical edition of Basil Bunting's poems; and Basil Bunting's Persia. His translations of Miguel Hernández, collected in I Have Lots of Heart, received the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize and P.E.N./New England Discovery Award. With Christian Wiman, he has co-edited The Open Door: 100 Poems from 100 Years of Poetry.

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