Looking for you through the gray rain,
your whole house is a face, windows
for eyes, door for a mouth. Chimney
breathing, your house waits. You
come down the street: you get a stare,
straight and slow to change.
No matter how willing and weak your own
face is, you know another face
for you, somewhere in the world: your house,
or a stone you choose on a mountain, or even
the wrinkled sea and its friend the wind.
Far away on an island off Alaska
there's a village gone back to forest,
and there leaning and peering--totem poles,
gray cedar eyes, crest, beak:
all those faces at home, staring from shadows,
Looking for you through the gray rain.
William Stafford
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