The House That Fire Built (poetry)

A house a family inherits that fills their nights and days with nightmare visions and haunting events. A house that burns to the ground and leaves them spinning in mysteries. The House That Fire Built tells the story of the poet and his wife seeking healing and insight as they struggle to protect themselves and their young daughter against menacing assaults from the human and supernatural worlds. Even when an arsonist is discovered, the criminal’s story only peels back greater mysteries about the forces circling the house. This house and arsonist possessed by what? And why? Is it hungry ghosts circling the death of a domineering father who died in the house? A secret loss buried by the former owners? Wounds going back to this land taken from the first peoples of California’s Santa Cruz Mountains? What in themselves led them to step into this world? As the couple is pulled deeper into the disturbing and sometimes violent mysteries of this house, their resilience and sense of reality pushed to the limits, they slowly come to see how the forces of destruction may also be a kind of salvation.

The House That Fire Built is told in lyric and narrative poems, reminiscent of the work of Robinson Jeffers in its “California Gothic” explorations of death and loss (and a bit of David Lynch, too). The setting colors events and opens reality up to deeper and sometimes violent mysteries, while also offering the solace and awareness found through the dhamma and the natural world. But where Jeffers typically ends his poetic narratives in tragedy, this story turns to the powers of love, meditation, and awareness for healing and growth.