Norway was fantastic – it snowed and snowed. Julie emailed a few days back and said that they’ve had the most snow since 1968, and it’s still falling. I found I was able to edit some poems
there. Perhaps being in a new place helped me to see them in a different light. It certainly allowed me to put back in lines that I’d taken out previously and feel more generous about them. This is a poem I wrote about a strange house in California that was built by Sarah Winchester. She inherited the vast Winchester Rifle fortune following the death of her husband in 1881. Haunted by the ghosts of men killed in the American Civil War she spent her remaining years and wealth in building a maze-like mansion to house their souls. Esther Morgan’s Guardian workshop was a starting point for this poem.
Mrs Winchester’s House
How many rooms the human heart
- downstairs led neither to the
cellar nor upstairs to the roof
and chimneys rising from empty
grates stopped short of ceiling and sky.
You had no blueprint; sketching out
each day the lines that other hands
made window in a floor or doors
open to the lawns below or
sometimes just a wall. They won’t catch
you now; not the ghosts of men who
lost their breath to The Gun that Won
the West, or your dear family
prising open chests in search of
the stash: the gold dinner service
they think you used to feed the dead,
the bonds and the cash, to find just
his obit and her knots of hair,
some woollen underwear, your Will
signed thirteen times, some old fishlines.
© Liz Bassett 2006
