Haunted house ii
poem
Each day I passed it, languorous and alone,
Mail in crumpled piles across the lawn,
Dead-eyed cling-filmed windows turned to
Mirrors, which watched and then ignored
All those who blundered down the path
Who saw the chain-link fence in death
Rattle and rust away, observed the birds
Reign there, crown themselves
Neighbours, kings, and feudal lords.
I knew what lived inside those walls
Better than myself, and yet
Could never think the hollow rooms
Inhabited —
Closer to the ground each year,
Alone, the house lived
Inside itself; it shifted, sighed,
And never spoke.
Great poem—as always!
One thing I really admire about your Substack is the quiet consistency with which you share your work. There’s something intimate about your writing, even as you keep a kind of distance. After reading your poems for the past year, I find myself wondering: who is Iris?
I don’t mean that in a nosy way—just that your voice is so distinctive, it stirs a natural curiosity about the person behind it.
This made me think of that bravura passage at the opening of the chapter in The Haunting of Hill House where we learn that the house insane.