This week’s poem, by Jefferson Navicky, is a kind of prayer-like envisioning of a couple’s home and all that will fill it. I love this poem’s exquisite litany of details, in all their common holiness, and I love the idea of a young and an old version of ourselves existing simultaneously, holding hope and love for each other.

Navicky is the author of four books, most recently “Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands,” a finalist for The Big Other Book Award in Fiction, as well as “Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose,” which won the Maine Literary Award for Poetry. He lives in the Midcoast.

House of Silver
By Jefferson Navicky

Somewhere there’s a house for us, a house for the us of long hours. You fill it with herbs, deer antlers, and bird nests. Mirrors reflect back only the us of our best guess, where we invest in a Good Stove. The house sits on a soft hill, the hill from whose height we watch our younger selves climb, struggle, hope, look up to our old-us. If this is all too much American dream I can take it out later, but there’s something in the feathers and hollow bones that lets me hold to this air-us. The house is not small, because we do not need to be small. You fill the house with sewing machines and canning jars, books about the sea, budgets and lists, maps, dried flowers, beeswax, song, acorns and bourbon. An altar in the corner of the house for everything we’ve lost, the us our life cost, love’s ash. Painted white with scraps of sky, the window cracked a bit above so the wind blows through, lets fresh air in. You’re at our kitchen table, arms full of eggs, twilight’s sienna in your silver hair, you’re out in the yard hacking a nice edge for your new garden patch, you’re asleep in the bed and I’m walking up. The stairs creak the us of age. Curtains hang loose. Look – out the window in the upper air, a blue patch just above the roof line hangs there long enough before coming down in light.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “House of Silver,” copyright 2023 by Jefferson Navicky, is reprinted from Hole in the Head Review. It appears by permission of the author.