What if this house were every house
we'd inhabited, lost friends
to startle us from the doorway,
each broken dish seamlessly mended,
stacked in a limitless cupboard?
All the pets we buried
bumping our ankles, nudging to be fed?
What if this house were every house
we'd longed to live in? My cottage,
shingles weathered a cape cod gray,
your cabin just below the treeline.
All that transpired as planned and all
that surprised us? Paintings
you imagined against closed lids.
Babies we left unconceived,
burbling, squalling, suffering first teeth.
Our daughter as we dreamed her,
on the lawn blowing bubbles,
sleek as an otter, nose
sunburnt, as glad to see us
as if we'd been away.
Would it be a kind of heaven,
a house expanding like a baking loaf,
this full? A consummation?
Like our lives unfolding before us
in the fingersnap between dying and death.