HOUSE MOVING

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Fall 2003 by Emmons, Jeanne

The trucks lurch with their burdens down the asphalt,

which groans and slowly depresses underneath,

and the street will never be the same. Four houses

without foundation advance on flatbeds

and seem to gain momentum like boulders

rolled away from the mouths of tombs,

or babies c-sectioned from their mother's wombs.

Behind them, the aging neighbors grumble,

abandoned along with the buried toys

of children now grown up and the skeletons

of pets in backyard graves. The maples

whose thick limbs are trimmed to clear the passage

were planted when the sawn lumber was sweet

and full of sap, and the nails still shiny with pounding.

These houses have long pasts, like my own

concrete porch where I stand, feeling stationary.

Do their histories labor by on those flatbeds

ghosts in wedding veils, christening gowns,

carpenters' aprons, academic regalia?

Or do they stay behind, pale shades lounging

on the maple branches or flattening themselves

against the poured walls of exposed basements?

Surely these are only shells of lives.

Yet my house seems to stiffen as they go by,

and to deepen its silence, as if its roots went down

into the ground, as if they went down

all the way to the center of the earth.

The porch tightens its hold underneath me.

And all along the street the old joists grow tense

with indignation and a great will to permanence.

JEANNE EMMONS

Jeanne Emmons teaches English and Writing at Briar Cliff University and is poetry editor of The Briar Cliff Review. Her collection of poetry, Rootbound (New Rivers Press, 1998), won the Minnesota Voices Project Competition and was subsequently named for a Pippistrelle Best of the Small Press Award. Her second book of poetry, Baseball Nights and DDT, is forthcoming from Pecan Grove Press. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Confrontation, New Orleans Review, American Scholar, Cream City Review, and other journals.