This house is sentient, light with rapture,

replete with canny, familiar ghosts.


This house has been indifferent

to vicissitudes of human fortune:

train wreck and famine, siege and tsunami.


The grounds have diminished. From the residue,

you have made an L-shaped paradise:

rhododendron, camellia, nasturtium,

eucalyptus – a global gazetteer.


On some summer nights, the pomaded air

heavy still with heat, there is a moment,

ecstatic, brief, when we will live forever.