This poem has a door, a locked door, <br />and curtains drawn against the day, <br />but at night the lights come on, one <br />in each room, and the neighbors swear <br />they hear music and the sound of dancing. <br />These days the neighbors will swear <br />to anything, but that is not why <br />the house is locked up and no one goes <br />in or out all day long; that is because <br />this is a poem first and a house only <br />at night when everyone should be asleep. <br />The milkman tries to stop at dawn, <br />for he has three frosty white bottles <br />to place by the back door, but his horse <br />shakes his head back and forth, and so <br />he passes on his way. The papers pile <br />up on the front porch until the rain <br />turns them into gray earth, and they run <br />down the stairs and say nothing <br />to anyone. Whoever made this house <br />had no idea of beauty -- it's all gray -- <br />and no idea of what a happy family <br />needs on a day in spring when tulips <br />shout from their brown beds in the yard. <br />Back there the rows are thick with weeds, <br />stickers, choke grass, the place has gone <br />to soggy mulch, and the tools are hanging <br />unused from their hooks in the tool room. <br />Think of a marriage taking place at one <br />in the afternoon on a Sunday in June <br />in the stuffy front room. The dining table <br />is set for twenty, and the tall glasses <br />filled with red wine, the silver sparkling. <br />But no one is going in or out, not even <br />a priest in his long white skirt, or a boy <br />in pressed shorts, or a plumber with a fat bag.<br /><br />Philip Levine<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-house-2/