The Seven Houses: In Memory of John F. Kennedy

Man, you are at the first door.
The woman receives you.
The woman takes you in.
With joy she takes you into her long hall.
The nine candles are burning.
Here with reptile and fish and beast
You dance in silence.
Here is the table with the First food.
This is the House of the Womb.

Man, you are at the second door.
A woman receives you.
With brief hands she holds you.
She delivers you into time,
Into light and into darkness,
Into sound and silence and a new dance.
From an outer spring
The natural water comes to your mouth.
Also on your head
A man lays seven bright drops.
This is the House of Birth.

Man. you are at the third door.
A tree in a gray courtyard.
Here the animals dare not enter.
The tree is loaded with apples.
Three women stand at the tree,
The bare bitter bloody tree.
With oil and cloths they stand at the tortured tree.
This is the House of Man.

Man, you are at the fourth door.
Plowman, merchant, engineer
Cross in a busy street.
On the seven oceans beyond
The ships sail on,
The peoples exchanging oil and wheat and music.
The cornstalk is tall in the field.
Through those yellow tides, that peace,
One woman comes,
On her shoulder a tall jar of untasted wine.
This is the House of Corn and Grape.

Man, you are at the fifth door.
The woman has brought you to her gate.
You have drunk her wine.
She has washed your hands at her threshold.
Now she prepares a bed.
Under the seven stars you watch and wait.
Inside, flames twist and untwist their hair.
This is the House of Love.

Man, you are at the sixth door.
The enemies with sculptured faces,
Gravely they dance
About the disordered dangerous board.
The broken pitcher spills its oil.
Dark at the wall
The harp is a tangle of strings.
The hungry sit at a narrow table
And the Golden Man
Summons another beast from the flames.
The Negro hangs on his tree.
At the sixth wall
In growing darkness, you lit one lamp.
This is the House of Policy.

Man, you are at the last door.
Three small mad venomous birds
Define in your skull
A new territory of silence.
The darkness staggered.
Seventy thousand ordered days
Lay raveled in the arms of a woman.
In a concord of grief
The enemies laid aside their masks,
And then resumed them
For platitude, epitaph, anger.
What they say is of small importance.
Through the growing arrogance of atom and planet
May the lamp still burn
And bread be broken at the tables of poor men.
(The heads bowed
And the sweet shape of the dove at the door.)
This is the House of History.