HOUSE I lie in a bedroom of a house that was built in 1862, we were told - the two windows still facing east into the bright daily reveille of the sun. The early birds are chirping, and I think of those who have slept here before, the family we bought the house from - the five Critchlows - and the engineer they told us about who lived here alone before them, the one who built onto the back of a house a large glassy room with wood beams. I have an old photograph of the house in black and white, a few small trees, and a curved dirt driveway, but I do not know who lived here then. So I go back to the Civil War and to the farmer who built the house and the rough stone walls that encompass the house and run up into the woods, he who mounted his thin wife in this room, while the war raged to the south, with the strength of a dairyman or with the tenderness of a dairyman or with both, alternating back and forth so as to give his wife much pleasure and to call down a son to earth to take over the cows and the farm when he no longer had the strength after all the days and nights of toil and prayer - the sun breaking over the same horizon into these same windows, lighting the same bed-space where I lie having nothing to farm, and no son, the dead farmer and his dead wife for company, feeling better and worse by turns. -- Billy Collins, former poet laureate USA "The Trouble with Poetry And Other Poems," Random House/NY 2005.