Coffee Cups And Stars

I dream of a big white house with wooden panels and old bricks on the exterior, a big white house with a big garden and only a grassy slope from the mossy lake. It will have an entire room just for writing, a big room with bookshelves lining the walls and a giant stereo that can play my favorite songs really loud without disturbing anyone and a giant desk with a typewriter and plenty of room for spare pages and coffee cups, and behind the chair there'll be a big window facing towards the lake so that when inspiration ceases to come I can spin the chair around and look out into the sun or rain. There will be a washing machine in the kitchen and a tub in the bathroom that is built inside the floor and the walls where I can take long bubble baths after long walks, and there'll be gravel roads and narrow paths throughout the forest where I can go for long walks with my German Shepherd called Max that I've always wanted to have. There'll be other houses around the lake at a convenient distance and I will know everyone who lives there and we'll go to each other's houses for dinner parties and barbecues or for cups or tea and talk about life and about books and about the great that was, and about the great that is still to come. I dream of a big white house with a big kitchen where the refrigerator is always filled with fresh food and with a cold pantry where I can store cans of jam and lemonade and carbonated water. Down by the lake I'll have my own little bridge out into the water and on the rainy summer days I'll wrap myself in rainwear and watch the drops hit the surface of the water and cause thousands of ripples before my eyes. And there'll be a big living room with many different kinds of sofas and stuffed chairs and a fireplace for when I invite people over and there'll be at least two guest rooms where they can stay the night when they are visiting. I dream of having a four wheel drive jeep that I take into the city to buy groceries or go to the café or stock up on paper for that typewriter and the city isn't more than twenty minutes away. And when night falls the lamp posts in the garden will light up and keep shadows at bay, and we'll sit in the garden and talk about everything until the sun has finally set and then a little longer still until the stars light up the sky as light bulbs against black silk, far, far away from where we are. A big white house that will be everything and nothing, and that nothing that is everything, to me.
POET IN THE JAR