A Sound Roof
May 27 2015


A sound roof,
then work your way down.

Bearing walls, partitions
double-glazed windows
facing south.
Joists laid, doors hung straight,
then wired, and plumbed
and covered in paint.
A concrete slab
for a solid foundation,
immovable
as bedrock.

From where

you're supposed to set off.
After all,
jobs and careers
go bottom up.
You don't start at the top
to build a life, a family.

But a sealed roof,
ventilated, drained
and safe from the elements

is the basic necessity.
Perhaps, even sufficient
to shelter you, and yours
beneath its shade;
the strength of its beams,
the load

it shoulders.

You look overhead
and feel protected, enclosed.
Until the roof goes
and water drips
and rot sets in,
and living like this
becomes unbearable.

A simple thing, a roof
a house
a home.

But the old asphalt shingles
are near the end,
trapping wetness
and mould infested
and beaten by merciless sun.

I suspect the new roof
will be my last.
With 3 decades left, at best
the weight of years
will sap us both.
As my head is topped with snow,
face grows haggard
frame sags.

Predictably
from the top down;
until something gives way
and we both become
uninhabitable.


My shingles are looking rough. Especially on the steeply pitched part of the roof with the southern exposure. That unremitting sun is hard on asphalt shingles.

They advertise 30-year shingles. Which is probably a lot of hype, in real world conditions. But if true, would just about take me to the point I likely couldn't live here on my own any more, anyway: my new roof, as well as my last.

Not much in life is top down. But building begins with the roof: certainly necessary; and possibly even sufficient.

The roof in the poem is vaguely personified. I project my own future onto it, as it accompanies me to the end. There is an identification with the building that has an air of resigned melancholy. Because the roof isn't just an object; it's also a house ...a home.

I think I've gone too often in this poem to lists, to neat sets of three. Three is a seductive number. It has this pleasing symmetry, this sense of completion. But I suspect that here the reader may find it tiresome and predictable; too neat, too wordy.