House of five fires, you never raised me.
Those nights when the throat of the furnace
wheezed and rattled its regular death,
I wanted your wide door,
your mottled air of bark and working sunlight,
wanted your smokehole with its stars,
and your roof curving its singing mouth above me.
Here are the tiers once filled with sleepers,
and their low laughter measured harmony or strife.
Here I could wake amazed at winter,
my breath in the draft a chain of violets.
The house I left as a child now seems
a shell of sobs. Each year I dream it sinister
and dig in my heels to keep out the intruder
banging at the back door. My eyes burn
from cat urine under the basement stairs
and the hall reveals a nameless hunger,
as if without a history, I should always walk
the cluttered streets of this hapless continent.
Thinking it best I be wanderer,
I rode whatever river, ignoring every zigzag,
every spin. I’ve been a fragment, less than my name,
shaking in a solitary landscape,
like the last burnt leaf on an oak.
What autumn wind told me you’d be waiting?
House of five fires, they take you for a tomb,
but I know better. When desolation comes,
I’ll hide your ridgepole in my spine
and melt into crow call, reminding my children
that spiders near your door
joined all the reddening blades of grass
without oil, hasp or uranium.
Roberta Hill Whiteman, “In the Longhouse, Oneida Museum” from Star Quilt. Copyright © 1984 by Roberta Hill Whiteman. Used by permission of Holy Cow! Press, www.holycowpress.org.
Source: Star Quilt (Holy Cow! Press, 1984)
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