The Greatest Birthday Gift: A Poem From My Husband

A HOUSE OF MANY ROOMS

                                    (To my spouse, James Kelly-Evans)

                        The house I live in has many rooms.

                        The house is both new and old at the same time.

                        The rooms are colored like the rainbow.

                        The room on the top floor, delphinium tinted,

                        has a portrait on its wall. In that painting

                        your eyes search mine before I leave and shut 
                        the door

                        in regret for all the ways I’ve failed you.

                        Two doors away I find myself in a world of jade 
                        green,

                        with underwater currents that run both smooth 
                        and wild, like River Nile.

                        They contain all our daily joys and foibles, the 
                        years and the friends,

                        quiet moments and now, more often, forgotten 
                        ones of accumulated life.

                        In the tower of orange, gold and fire

                        is a painting of an ideal, muscular St.George,
                        the demon in his eyes.

                        He bears his crossed shield and an impenetrable 
                        warrior’s helmet--

                        He is one of those idealists the world hopes for 
                        and rejects. 

                        His eyes are your eyes, wide as magic.

                        In the black and purple wound colored chamber

                        the man in the mural holds in his hand a golden 
                        chain

                        and the dragon at the end of the tethered chain 
                        is the

                        soul of my mate’s anger at all the ways life has 
                        cheated him,

                        defeated by careers he never had and the ages 
                        he missed living in.

                        In the newest room in the house of many rooms

                        countless windows flood us with the light of 
                        Van Gogh’s summer wheat

                        turned to blond dust at the End of the Harvest

                        gathered in my mind like all your kind words
                        and buried secrets.

                        At the end of a long hall lies the crimson room, 
                        red as poppy blood.

                        There your eyes graze mine and your lips touch 
                        mine and for that moment

                        I forget the rest: the house of many rooms, 
                        old and new,

                        that was not only your life but my life as well.

                                    -R. Daniel Evans   2012