Stephen Dunn<\/a> wrote when his family rented the house from us. I think this must have been 1973-4, when Dunn was a visiting professor at Syracuse University and we were in London. The poem, typed on a real typewriter that bit into the paper, reads:<\/p>\nLetter to a Distant Landlord<\/p>\n
This is the 20th century and you<\/p>\n
are invisible, across the Atlantic,<\/p>\n
beyond reach. We sleep in your bed,<\/p>\n
we make love where<\/p>\n
you made love and it’s strange<\/p>\n
we’ve not met.<\/p>\n
This house, though, does speak<\/p>\n
of you; all the books, the good<\/p>\n
junk in the attic, that<\/p>\n
startling print in the upstairs hall.<\/p>\n
You’ve brought the past forward<\/p>\n
to mingle like a fine, old grandfather<\/p>\n
with the appliances and dust.<\/p>\n
And we approve.<\/p>\n
Even the ghosts here are intelligent.<\/p>\n
They wait til the children are asleep<\/p>\n
then sit in the white chairs<\/p>\n
in the livingroom. Some nights<\/p>\n
it’s Nietzsche, last night it was<\/p>\n
Marx. They are all timbre<\/p>\n
and smoke, all they want is<\/p>\n
for me to get off my ass, to break<\/p>\n
my spririt’s sleep.<\/p>\n
But they don’t insist. They’ve seen<\/p>\n
so much their rancor has turned<\/p>\n
to sighs. We do not learn<\/p>\n
is what they’ve learned.<\/p>\n
Yet we are comfortable in your house.<\/p>\n
It is what we wanted.<\/p>\n
The park nearby is beautiful<\/p>\n
and dangerous, a 20th century park,<\/p>\n
the kind we must walk through. Our small<\/p>\n
belligerent dog picks fights there<\/p>\n
with Shepherds. They pick fights with him.<\/p>\n
Sometimes though they’re all tails and tongues,<\/p>\n
like us, and the air smells good<\/p>\n
and the grass is freshly cut.<\/p>\n
And so we send our checks<\/p>\n
and try to imagine your hands,<\/p>\n
your face, the way you discuss<\/p>\n
the things you must discuss.<\/p>\n
Some day after you’re back,<\/p>\n
smelling our smells and rearranging<\/p>\n
your lives, maybe we’ll appear<\/p>\n
at your door disguised as ourselves.<\/p>\n
We’ll say we’re looking for a house<\/p>\n
(that’ll be our only hint), sneak<\/p>\n
the glimpses we want, and move on<\/p>\n
like strangers who brushed by<\/p>\n
on their way somewhere else<\/p>\n
and don’t know why, in this century,<\/p>\n
they cannot stop.<\/p>\n
I love this poem as an evocation of my home, Dunn’s private life, and the 20th century. I’d only quarrel with one aspect (and even on this point I grant Dunn his license). I doubt that the ghosts in our house talk about Nieztsche and Marx very often. There are shelves of books by those authors that might conjure their spirits once in a while, but I’m sure they don’t reign over the house. The local spirits are English, bewigged, dusty, and interested in facts rather than theories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Syracuse, NY) We’re visiting my parents in the house where I grew up. It’s a cottage on the top of a steep hill. The back yard leads into a large urban park: nicely landscaped with meadows and stands of cypress trees, but always somewhat dangerous. Inside, as I’ve noted before, there are almost 30,000 books. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fine-arts","category-memoir"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}