Wallace Stevens’s Open House

Wallace Stevens’s Open House Marilyn E. Johnston I hover in that quaint vestibule shelteringyour daily passage to and from the stone city.The entrance runs to a spaciousness of carpetup curving stairs and through well-haunted rooms I climb to the front second-floor landingwhere you hung a piano in airfor your daughter to play. Sneak a peekback toward the purple blocksof Hartford, Braille read knobs to catch a print lingering, brush closeto your ghostly habiliments, your daily dressingroom. No one knows which spaceyou wrote in, but I like that ducked-into study,off the main door, or maybe, upstairs,aloft, over the other roomswhere you sat in intimacy banishedor self-banished from domesticity. I can’t imagine you mowing this lawn,though they paint you down on all foursscrubbing this kitchen floorto save Elsie trouble. Elsie handed this houseto a local diocese that housed priestsfor sixty years. Now available: “a real gem,118 Westerly Terrace, a fixer-upper. . . exclusive neighborhood . . .with updated kitchen and bathscould be really fabulous . . .” Perhaps these roses are yours,by the back door and the sun roomhouse the emptiness of the house at nightwhere you sat leaning to pagesin the late calm, reading a book. I breathe your undercurrent of silence,your virile atmosphere, climb the attic stairs,find a garret pole of loose bare hangers, [End Page 245] a skeleton of fine small bones on its sidesleeping the long sleep between joists. [End Page 246] Marilyn E. Johnston Bloomfield, Connecticut Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press