The Homer Mitchell Place

By John Engels 1931–2007 John Engels

The mountains carry snow, the season fails.

Jackstraw clapboard shivers on its nails,

the freezing air blows maple leaves and dust,

a thousand nails bleed laceries of rust,

slates crack and slide away, the gutters sprout.

I wonder: do a dead man’s bones come out

like these old lintels and wasp-riddled beams?

I ask in simple consequence of structure seen

in this old house, grown sturdy in its fall,

the brace and bone of it come clear of all

I took for substance, what I could not prove

from any measure of design or love.

Or is it rather that he falls away

to no articulation but decay,

however brightly leap the brass-hinged bone,

beam and rafter, joist and cellar-stone?

John Engels, “The Homer Mitchell Place” from Weather-Fear: New and Selected Poems (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1983). Copyright © 1983 by John Engels. Used with the permission of the author.

Source: Weather-Fear: New and Selected Poems 1958-1982 (1983)

Biography

John Engels grew up in South Bend, Indiana. He earned an AB in English from the University of Notre Dame, served in the US Navy for three years, attended University College, Dublin, and received an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1957. Engels published over 10 collections of poetry, among them The Homer Mitchell Place (1968), Weather-Fear: New and Selected Poems 1958–1982 (1983), Walking to Cootehill: New and Selected Poems, . . .

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