HOW TO BUILD AN AMERICAN HOME

The first time I learned how we all inhabit an acoustic architecture of space,
it was sound traveling across a landscape, contouring objects, carving
between them, bringing forth a movement of bodies through space. You
could stand inside a metal sculpture of a whale, close your eyes; or you could
walk in an underground tunnel toward a concrete echo. The house is an
arrangement of objects with which we move through the world. In this way
we become familiar with a system of echolocation. Children of immigrants
take their houses wherever they go, its sounds patter and shake like a
drawerful of dishes, cups, utensils.

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HOW TO BUILD AN AMERICAN HOME

If the body is the source of all language,
                                                                            semantic template
         if our limbs, skin, organs enact meaning like a metaphor, before
         we are able to speak it;

                                                        we could for sure trace the square
of light projected from the window onto the wall;
                                                        you might believe me when I gesture                                   
toward the edges in all their woolly glory
                                                                                   or find in my throat
                                   a brown-winged insect,
                                                        transiting,
                                             for a shadow in which to meet.

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HOW TO BUILD AN AMERICAN HOME

On their way to the ancestral graves:
                                                                          it was on an island
and she was not quite sure how to reach it. If a cargo boat passes by in bright
yellow and reddened paint, then a sound will occur in her heart like a massive          
train crossing a bridge overhead.

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HOW TO BUILD AN AMERICAN HOME

A house is a body; it is not permeable.

         Inside, we grow a forest of moon, marsh, bird. Outside, the world
looms large and flat as a paper hole in the ceilingspace.

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Poems in this series are from a manuscript entitled "House A." For instance: Find a blueprint, submerge it in water. Or, hold your tracing paper to the crack in the ceiling.