Excerpt from The House Seen from Nowhere

by Keith Waldrop

TRANSPARENT LIKE THE AIR

spirits love
houses and also

certain exemplary places

(such as the rotten
pilings off
India Point)

without necessarily controlling
the intervening spaces

they are nothing

they have not returned

(a primitive
sign meaning ‘neither…nor’)

they do not
need to return I am
still here I

can bear only
the figures light
delineates not
the light itself

(unstable, un-
determined, in a
state of final ruin where
ontology seeps in)

clear things
with dark
addresses

certain stones give
birth to other stones

(bodies we label
heavy) some

split into thin
flakes tightly
embedded a

liquid

petrified

animals

fallen down shafts the
marrow of their bones

frozen to this
selfsame

stone
(opaque

and then the flash
of a bird’s wing) I

go down the column

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