Stephen Hopkin's House
You’d never know it’s a museum: the plaque
by the doorway’s as plain as any other, with a name,
a date, a life that can be summarized. You’d pass it, probably –
a resident pedestrian, trying out the city on new feet
grown soft from months of driving.
Where does all this stupid hope come from?
you’d asked yourself, listless if not jaded. There are colors
that are not the sun’s, not celestial or vegetable
that you expect out of the summer.
Once, every door that opened bore surprises:
after an anonymous bus ride, the things
through the thick windows passing one after another,
disconnected, a bright porch led to a dark house
where your father’s friend uncoiled a black rope from a box
and fed its hiss white rats. Or the fresh smell of paint
as Dad made some house slick with raspberry
and the trembling of its sudden, unfamiliar flowers.
Other people’s yards. The playgrounds of other kids’ schools,
where recess came when you both were still up on their jungle gym,
slurping identical Oranginas. Things grew out of the city –
with every walk it grew another branch, leaf-heavy, ardent.
Every day now everything’s the same: you know
the streets that cross each other, who lives where, and where
to find the common joys of landscape, pretty architecture.
You desire flowers,
mostly, a patch of sunny grass, a glass
of vended lemonade. But here’s an “open” sign
on somebody’s red house: the door opens and inside there’s a slow
and patient tour guide, crisply narrating the life
that lulled each room to its present sweet inertia.
The tarnished mirrors venture to accept you, your sunburnt image;
the facets on the sconces glitter, just to help the candles out.
Practical and beautiful. Under these low plaster ceilings –
rafters being flammable – you’ve learned, at last,
to be a tourist in your own land.
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