From 2001-2008, I ran a newspaper distributorship northeast of Indianapolis. Many nights I had a route or two to deliver. I really did not enjoy the winters, but driving back-country roads was a great time to think and observe a normally unseen world.
A few miles outside of Anderson, I came across an abandoned house that really connected with my soul. I returned during the daylight to take a closer look. Something about how the front door stood open hit me. You could see straight through the house and out a broken kitchen window. I remember sitting in the parking lot and just staring into the ruins of what once was some family’s home. I let my mind wander and create a tragic story. It felt so real, it actually brought me to tears.
This poem was one of many written on the side of a random road, in between tossing copies of The Indianapolis Star into delivery tubes. In August, this piece and two others, “Fairmount” and “Disturbing the Pond,” were added to the Indiana Arts Commission’s Poetry Database called “INverse,” an archive preserving Indiana poetry for future generations of writers and readers. Now in the second year of adding poems, they have pieces from 73 poets. You can check out the site and 183 poems here.
Someone Left the Door Open
Someone
left the door open,
let the days blow through,
across the dining room and down the hall,
out the broken glass of a bedroom window.
Someone
let the paint chip,
hung up on the siding salesman
and let naked boards turn gray,
losing their teeth to rot.
Someone
let the shingles rain to the yard,
left storms trickling through the house,
washing away all the
pleasant memories of youth.
Someone
pulled out support beams,
took a sledge to the foundation
and never turned around,
never even paused to look back
at the rubble of our collapse.
_______________
Previously appeared in New England Writers (’08), Poemegranite (a Poetry Society of Indiana project), and Bards Against Hunger, 5th Anniversary Edition (’17).
| Copyright © 2021 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there. |
Beautiful repetition of "Someone" that is alternately accusation, supplication, or benediction. Or all at the same time.
ReplyDeleteBob, could we read the “someone” as entirely accusatory, one or another (maybe different ones) of the humans who dwelled there, and the “our” as the collection of physical remains (sentient to the point of pleasantly remembering their early years) neglected by that or those humans?
DeleteWhat an excellent relationship poem--taking an abandoned house and turning it into the collapse of a relationship. Perfect.
ReplyDeleteMichael, I’m not sure that the “our” that appears as the penultimate word of Maik’s poem can refer to someone previously sharing “a relationship” (romantic, sexual) with the narrator. Those “pleasant memories of youth,” for example, seem to fight that notion.
DeleteOr did you mean something else by “a relationship”?
To me the voice might really be the house itself, and the "our" collective. "Our" family, "our" life, "our" farm, "our" love, "our" very existence. Nothing is lonlier than the open door of an abandoned home, swinging in the vagrant wind.
ReplyDeleteThis speaks so strongly to my own love of old structures of any kind. I have spent 40 plus years as a termite man, and have had the pleasure to inspect every type of aged building imaginable. It is such a fascination for me that I have actually dreamed about it many times.
ReplyDeleteRoger may be correct, but I still feel this is a very sad love poem about a relationship that went in the wrong direction and the house is a metaphor for the ending of a love affair.
ReplyDelete