Touch to the Heart

by Chris Patterson

It can look like a house
If you look from outside.

It can vary as houses can,
tudor, colonial, split-level.

Mine is gingerbread,
yellow, bright,
wrapped by a porch
dotted with rockers and a swing.

Appearing ordinary from the outside,
as houses can but more rooms
than physics will allow await within.

Enter the front room.
Sunny, airy, the aroma of
tea and something baked
greets you at the door.

A grand staircase leads
you to a hall.
Look left, look right
there are doors as far
as imagination can stretch them.

Turn left and stop
several doors down.
This particular door
has a Bloom County
cartoon taped to it.

Open to a small room
framed by a loft with
horrid green shag carpet
underneath.

It can only be a dorm room
or a pysch ward,
the carpet is that bad.

An illicit smell permeates
the air, only slightly covered
by incense and clove.

As with each of these rooms,
the details become sharper
the further you walk into the room.

A turntable plays
a new band called
REM or U2 or classics like
The Who or Rickie Lee Jones.

Faces fade in like
materializing ghosts.
Their conversations and
their laughter do not quite
echo but flirt with the threshold
of perceptible sound.

Of all the senses felt
in this house, it's the
touch to the heart
that's hardest to define.

It begins as a feeling
of happiness until
it grows into longing.

Which will not be satifsfied
so it evolves into a dull ache.
Eventually it's tempered
by a melancholy you wear like
a poncho.

Until you close the door, stop
on the front porch and breathe
the present air, the poncho
becoming burdensome.

Though each room has
its own sights, smells
and sounds, the touch
to the heart results in
the same cycle of emotion.

The house is called memory.
The touch is called nostalgia.

The Author

I was born in Elmira, New York and moved around to all the hot spots of the automobile industry growing up. I graduated from Michigan State University and after graduating I worked in Chicago as a writer/producer and director of local television and radio commercials and marketing videos for local companies. In 1995, I opened a bagel shop in Hilton Head, South Carolina. When that closed in 1999, I went to work for Walt Disney Company. I currently am a training facilitator at the Disney Reservation Center. I enjoy writing poetry, especially for my family and friends.