Address Book

Colorado, Illinois, Virginia, these the

predominant states in my address book,

each home a temporary stop on a journey

defined not so much by destination but place.

Home is a door that opens inward and contains

our breath, our cries, the ghosts of our passions.

Home is a stairway that climbs and descends, the 

choice of direction unknown until we arrive.

Walls, then, must be designed to protect us from the

embarrassing display of our spirits’ disarray.

Home is also a door that opens outward,

as I discovered upon learning of distance.

We step first foot outside, inhale, and are seduced

by sirens of potential in remote places.

* * *

An old red house stands vacant beside a scenic 

rural road in the hills of northern Virginia.

Two willows occupy the land beside a stream

fed by springs and winter’s residue. No doubt the

land here was once trod by soldiers; battlefields near

yield fertile grasses, in fall they turn blood-amber.

But this house stands pondering. Wisdom seeps out of 

twenty well-placed windows from which timorous ghosts

view themselves as children; aging, dying as 

must be the final way of all we witness.

You are drawn to this place. You peer inside one warped

single-pane window through sunlit dust and stillness,

the only furniture an old desk. Wide-plank floors 

creak beneath the weight of the past. Walls sigh.

* * *

Distance itself may be the first illusion. 

Now is only now and not where we are bound.

There may be a lesson: The first step is not where 

the journey of one thousand miles begins. It starts 

the moment that our fingertips touch the doorknob. 

Before its squeaky turn unlocks bolt from wood, 

before the door is pulled on lazy hinges to

look outside or in, before we exhale.

And when we next inhale, we are hurtling 

through life’s rain of lovers, grief, and redemption.

Love is a poor excuse for a travel guide 

and there are no cartographers of the human heart.

Meet me on the front porch of the red house. I will 

wait for you so we may open this door together. 

--Martin A. Bartels (working draft)