The Singing House

for Peter Markus

a house shored up on the mud banks of the river
where all day the moon sleeps in the guestroom
where two brothers shine a light in the crawl space
on a storybook they sing to each other the living 
room full of dead people playing blackjack 
on a coffee table a house where poems fall 
from the shade tree outside a plastic flower 
sticking out of the blackened slats of a cupola 
in the master bedroom a houseboat the man 
who lives there paddling with a two-by-four 
the boiler room where winter stays in the pipes 
the wiring in the walls short-circuiting the lights 
like a bathroom where the withered swallow pills 
that claim to relieve pain vomiting in the sink 
when they know they want to live in a house 
where tree branches plant themselves into 
the clapboard siding thrown by windstorms
each ripped-up shingle becoming a star where 
townspeople used to take lawbreakers to hang 
on the oak tree in the backyard where their ghosts 
live in the basement writing on the walls in 
another language within them the studs made 
of driftwood soaked by the river that runs out front
a window where a child sits at looking across
to the gas flares in the country across the way 
a washroom where a father cleans blood out 
of his clothes again shored up on the riverbank
a house a fish once sang that we can all live in