Damp Rot

Water sheets on the old stone of the cellar walls,

trickles out over the floor into little deltas of mud,

worse every year, so that now I can see daylight

at the footings, and upstairs the floors sometimes

tremble and the clothes go damp in the closets. And sometimes

I think the whole place is about to come down, and have begun

to dream at night of moving, unaccountably sad

to think of leaving this house which has possessed me now

for eighteen years, in which one of us has died

and two been born, for all its elegance of detail most everything

not right in it, or long gone bad, nothing

ever done which should have been, one hundred years

and more of water rancid in the cellars, moldings

never finished or else mitred crookedly, all

the small and growing energies of dirt and rot

wherever we care to look, whenever we do. And we do.

But I dream also of the pine grove of my planting,

which I know I love and which is the green truth

of this place: in one day ten years ago

I dug fourteen small trees, wrapped the roots

in burlap, dragged them down from the top ridge

of the hill, spaced them carefully, watered

them each day for one whole season. Now

they are twenty feet high, thick roots

already at the cellar wall, vigorous and loud

even in little winds, only the hemlock

mournful and reluctant to do much in the way

of increasing itself. But it is clear

that if I do not freely leave this place,

it will leave me—though, as Ray Reynolds says,

digging at a powdery floor joist with his knife,

there may be more here than I think, better

than a two-by-six at least; and his blade slides

two inches in and stops at what he calls

the heartwood, meaning, as I take it, at the wood

which has not yet given way.

Copyright Credit: John Engels, “Damp Rot” 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)