In the House that Emma Built
There are two chambers
One looks upon the other
And the other looks outward

A turntable spins ye-ye
A darkness sleeps in fits
A cat speaks in Mandarin
and the walls, last forever

A man is hidden under the boards
While the window glares on its curtains
All lines cast suspicions
on the vagueries of nature’s curve

Brightly bit, sound asleep
exposed in so many tears
and projected through with
the light of shining wit
a drama in black and white
and a tragedy in color

The turntable spins ye-ye
the dance party is over
and the cat licks its chops
in the house that emma built

in a sub-basement that the house built
in a different plane, on a scale removed
the memories of the house dream an emma
cast in infrared and animated with love
a panoply of spirits shimmering and laughing
cooking and breathing and weaving a guitar out of old chord

kittens act out Siysphus with a ball of twine
on a mountain of folded laundry
the bicycle room looks upon the garden
and echoes with the ring of rusty belling
a friend is dozed upon the chaise casting spells
of resurrection…

awaken dear emma, awaken
life under rebar and concrete oppression
erodes all homes with moisture and oxygen
the house becomes the garden, the window the way through
the emma — the notion, and the idea — a means to
awake dear emma, awake
and live in musical tires, with spyrographs drunk in honey
and fungus budding through floorboards, over sweet oceans
in time with all awakening

the house becomes the emma
a smile simply drawn
in parametric models
grown from new math
all the lawns have been banished
and the asphalt all ground up
what becomes is Now is emergent
this house that emma built
a lattice of dreams in habit

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“The House that Emma Built” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.