Some Houses Have an Immutable Soul
Poetry
We have been walking in widening circles
around the idea of a house, a writing
community really, we once briefly inhabited
before it was bulldozed to dust.
With it died a full century of charm,
and the ghost of the girl in a red dress,
nevermore, in a fledgling city
that had no awareness of itself.
If ever a house had a soul, it was that one.
Box by box, the house was rebuilt bland,
seven corporate stories high, of coveted
luxury lofts stacked above a new center
for writers and a few salvaged boards
from the old café theater bar where we once
performed stories of love and other illusions,
not knowing, like the city, and the ever-beloved
house, how much things would change
in our lives over the next fifteen years.
Only dreams of the house didn’t change,
as we walk, she is rising up in us
again, magnificent and ramshackle.
