house project: excerpt from a longer work

VIII.
Nothing has ever quite fit us - not
the spaces
the angles
the doorknobs
the windowpanes.
The shape
of a house
is important.
The next house was narrow
and it pushed us together.
So close we heard
each other saying things
we had never meant
to say,
things we maybe didn’t mean
at all.
Clarity became important
because it became impossible.
We talked a lot more
but silence had the power.
You cannot see the smoke stacks
from that house, you can see
the old man next door
sunning himself in black bikini bottoms.

IX.
Every garage sale was a sacred altar
to our changing conception
of need.
What we wanted was freedom
of movement, less
on our shoulders.
It doesn’t matter how many times
you place objects in boxes,
what means something is
how many times you
try to lift and drag
the heaviest parts of you
through doorway after doorway.
We had been a body
but then we became a house,
as soon as we no longer shared one,
haunted, inhabited, echoing lost sounds.