Portrait of My Mother as a House

Painting by Margo Cavis


Portrait of My Mother as a House


by C. L. Bledsoe

The body is a house of many windows:
there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying
on the passers-by to come and love us.
– Robert Louis Stevenson


Say the clouds are miseries, drifting

across the blue void of the sky’s mind
above me, older than they seem.

Say the winds are memories, pushing
clouds, the fluff of despair that manages
to come between the sun and the ground
and therefore darken life.

Say the birds are wants, their wings flapping
out wind, generating paths no one
remembers they’ve built.

Say the power lines are needs, supporting
the birds, but thinking the birds are keeping
them up.

Say the ground is habit, holding
the power lines up,
because it doesn’t know anything else to do.

Say these windows are eyes, looking
lest their light fade, darken
and crack, so that all who pass
are driven to misery, shed their flesh
and jump into the sky to drift.


Posted over on The Aurora Review