Open
By
Mark Irwin
When they entered the house, which was a very large house
the way a cloud is large, the pages of their story
seemed like cracks in the earth, a man's shirt, or a woman's
blouse, and the stranger in the house told them to make
themselves at home in the house that was not their house,
and told them to write down the three most important gifts
in each of their lives, and then continued to explain how
there were three doors in the house and at each door they must
forfeit one of these gifts, and how the real story always begins
at the third door, where each of them will pause and begin
to crawl, leaving the field of time, where now you pause,
touching the door of this page, wiping away each word, waiting to enter.
the way a cloud is large, the pages of their story
seemed like cracks in the earth, a man's shirt, or a woman's
blouse, and the stranger in the house told them to make
themselves at home in the house that was not their house,
and told them to write down the three most important gifts
in each of their lives, and then continued to explain how
there were three doors in the house and at each door they must
forfeit one of these gifts, and how the real story always begins
at the third door, where each of them will pause and begin
to crawl, leaving the field of time, where now you pause,
touching the door of this page, wiping away each word, waiting to enter.
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Disclaimer
We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2018 by Mark Irwin, "Open," from Field, (No. 98, Spring 2018). Poem reprinted by permission of Mark Irwin and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.