& in the mornings sometimes awoke so cold —the wind in Iowa City was brutal— those days of doubt, those days of troubled land, that I did not want to get out of bed &
The first address is of the house we rented twenty years ago, when our kids were young. Ten minutes on foot—half a mile—from the place where we now live. In reality, however, there is no address, not any longer.
The stillness you prize. Won’t prize you back. Two beefsteaks. Ripening on a windowsill. A purple tray. Piled with coal. From the field. Of solemn brothers calling. Your name in unison you learn. Men are irrelevant but. Persistent symmetries are not.
A house is not a home. It is but a pile of sticks. “‘Home is,” on the other hand, as Robert Frost famously said, “the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’” Less well known, and more resonant, are the words that follow: “‘I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’”
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