The Glass House.

for Lynn Kilpatrick

–the name, evidently, for the house itself
and the acreage on which it sat, and where
the architect lived with his partner,

living in episodes in a house made of light
and no walls, another of brick, a farmhouse
where they could watch TV, the turreted

library, crowned with an upside down
coffee filter made of concrete. Soon,
after the eastern winter has left for good,

it will be visited again, and the visitors
will wander as if in the margins of a
thoroughly commented upon book:

here, with the forks, is a pair of his glasses.
There, no kitchen dishwasher; here, no
bathroom. A peony and iris garden.

They collected copper cookware and
paintings. As befits a house that is houses
and is also a museum, there are no

evidences of daily life, or a life that I
would call daily, the knives not put away,
the box of letters on the shelf. The coiled

spines of notebooks. But a box of a house,
so perfectly arranged with all the other
structures at play—it was not meant,

I think, to be a reproach—that ruthless
elegance one of their friends said
took the form of nothing homely on display,

except for the little notes they left each other,
one working in the garden while the other
read in the library. Ephemera now, of course,

gone, since they died within five months
of each other. Why are these men a parable?
Why are their houses museums? I ask this

with feeling from an inelegant room,
where I have stored every memory interleaved
between the books ordered without system,

and where I may search for weeks and months
and years and possibly find them, or not:
Family Happiness one spine reads. Always

another. The Keeper of Lost Causes. Eye to Eye.

[NOTE: it’s true I took approximately 90% of the details from a New York Times story. Is that so wrong?]

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