Hello again, and happy Halloween. What better way to celebrate this carnival of masks and markets than with some elegant yet unsettling “House” poems, courtesy of Lindsey Webb’s poised and precise domestic uncanny. A certain élan smoothes the more sinister rumblings of these dispatches or “little lessons.” We may begin in a world of thought experiments or thought-glitches, but we pass through textured boundaries to arrive somewhere more mystical, to find fates murmuring over a witch’s brew. Webb’s tidy sentences aren’t all “satin duration,” not just mind contemplating household tableaux but leaky, melty, bleeding desire stains and structures the proceedings. The ordinary inventory—of cats, paneling, aloe plants—offers to diagram the house, but this blueprint foregrounds its lacunae. Moved to misspeak by something that remains out of sight, and continues to loom unaddressed, these poems offer a peripheral vision of unsettled domesticity, where feeling out space risks confronting some force we’d rather not name. Go ahead: “Enter the enter.” –The Editors and Poetry Staff
from “House”
They say feet are for carrying the mind around, as trees are for concepts. Forests plant a thin film of sweat over the city. They say I have entered the enter. To enter the world of baptism is easy, to enter the world of paneling difficult. Little blond tables. I’ll describe what I see: heaven, a young woman with her back turned to the future, a little lesson.
*
How does the house desire me? I sit in a soft chair among the group, and a cat licks its shoulder. I’ve been asked to ponder as a market ponders. A child has come to the window to kiss it. It desires my time, I posit, while the cat dies again. Satin duration. Things do not appear from nowhere, another scolds, though an aloe leaf colors my hand. This will impede my progress. My desire will color the next room.
*
Love melts fruit like eyeballs into broth, and forms an accidental lattice. At the past’s first corner, sound cups my cheek like rain fade along the riverfront. Like a rusted listen. This is the house’s perfect fashion, in that its signal attenuates over time. A hallway measures time while a memory of an old place, perhaps Wyoming or Denmark, bleeds it.