Houses

I walk past houses and I feel hit with things - maybe they are the subtle energies of the beings inside, or dreams of the past, or maybe just rapid association. The city I live in is full of doubles built in the thirties - streets from here to up Athens Avenue past Marlowe and Belle, Mars to Carabel Avenue and beyond.

I am still and the houses move past me - a street with little stubby trees, exposed and Lego built fifties fast. Then dense lush oaks, the temperature drops, and I feel the forties, the fever of the fence and the things inside the fence. Then I come to a street two miles away that looks identical to my street. The west side was built so fast - these cities built so fast. Like they knew our country would be begin de-industrializing by 1960, and they wanted to get folks lined up for the last and most massive American thrusts into the production machine.

I walk past and I ask the houses what's inside. Like strangers as lovers I wonder in passing what it feels like to be inside.

I walk past a yellow and brown double and feel bad parties and overhead lights and what am I remembering - is it the memory of the house or a memory from a past life or just from my earliest childhood?

I always dream of houses. I've been through all kinds of structures, and I'm ignorant, I don't know what things are called. Once in a dream, I sipped soup in a split level as the sun went down and felt gut level regret. I met my grandmother again in a vast ring shaped house and introduced her to my new husband, and we showed her our moonstone wedding rings and she gave me a crown. More, though, I lucid dream into the house I grew up in, or places with walls soft from mold or flickers in the corners or heavy with the Murphy's oil soap smell of still old death.

In walking and in dreaming, I'm hit with otherness breathing in houses.