BROOK FARM
There is poetry here.
Lovers of words
have pressed it into the wood floors
with their feet;
it has escaped their red, prolific tongues
and floated on the silence
hanging in the room’s air
during afternoon readings, settling
lightly into corners, stirred
and in motion again each time
a writer’s ghost swishes by,
or a young girl pauses, carefully
selecting a book from a nearby
shelf. There is
poetry here, there is no
escaping it or exorcising it
from this Inn, no matter whom
the keeper; little do they know
it went up with the beams,
was mixed and troweled
with the plaster, and flows freely
through the windows on warm summer
evenings. In winter, its heat
is in the fire
making the parlor walls glow, the books
on the shelves leaping
with the flames.