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About This Poem
The Master's House Part I
Through city streets past vacant mills, across a river no longer pristine, between paint chipped multi-family homes, where a hundred years ago small children ran squealing to Auntie’s on covered front porches; my car traveled tentatively, encasing, enclosing, protecting, me from the unfamiliar, rundown, decaying, ambience of the area. Halting at graffitied stop signs, pausing, nominally, at red lights, I searched for the Shamans home.
The house sat soot colored, gray, shutters hanging precariously, perched fallen
lashes, from rotten sashes. Coated with the grime of years. A stair railing waggled,
held by bracers of five-inch nails. I tread up them, carefully, watching where I placed
the weight, of my slight form.
The door stood, agape, and I entered,full of brass, like Gretel into the wood, trusting
like Dionysus in what my light would find. I walked upward grimacing. Wreaths of Christmas past, hung dust-glazed upon dreary doors, whose foot worn mats had long
since lost the battle against the mill town’s grime. Her door, my Witch's, was on the
third floor. Three the number of creation, the trinity of the soul. Adorned with an
elephant knocker of dull brass,a red, hollow, plastic, heart hung from its trunk, a truly unorthodox doorknocker. Tapping, tapping, with the hollow heart, upon the
hallowed door, my heart echoed its beat and rose in my throat.
The door sprang inward, opening, upon to a Buddha-like smile. Her arms wrapped
warmly around me, Welcoming. A bay of east facing windows, Backlit her in an
angelic glow. I faced forward. My vision encompassing three rooms. We stood
amidst the eye of the storm.
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