Porches
If a house has a lap, it’s the porch
that hauls you up to sit, sit, quick,
in woven furniture that creaks
under your weight. In a hammock
that stretches you between its chains,
its links and space that make you think
for minutes at a time, that love can be
like this. In bone-white rocking chairs
like seated skeletons you flesh out
with your body and the music you make,
pumping back and forth, away and towards.
Life is so simple on the porch. Like a stage
under a white lace proscenium arch where
you can say whatever it is, or stay quiet
and not chat. Or pray, or cry, in dry dock
but in motion; a porch is a boat, of course,
that pulls the house through the night,
both lap and eyes. Porch used to go with
church, a vestibule of the sacred, outpost
of the profane. A ghost could be at home
here where thin air is thinner, smoke is
welcome, you can pick your nose, loaf
and invite your soul, as Walt says. They go
together and your hangover can hang out
on the porch, this dressing room where
overalls, work clothes, were shed before
the house was entered, this space hung off
known rooms with names and designations,
like the tray strapped to the shoulders
of the girl – as she was called – in old films,
moving through the foyer calling Cigars,
cigarettes? like an offer of more than
nicotine, something you’re sure to need.
Aileen La Tourette facilitates a weekly poetry therapy group, and was previously a lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. Her previous work includes Downward Mobility (Headland, 2004), Touching Base (Headland 2006) and a fiction novel, The Oldest Girl (Ilura Press (Aust)2008).
Carol Ann Duffy says: I am assuming that Aileen La Tourette’s poem ‘Porches’ is set in the US, which has a culture of hammocks and sitting outside. Its description of comfort, and how we don’t always know what we need, or where we’ll find it, made me wish I had a porch with a white rocking-chair...