New rooms

Even if you never find the house of your dreams

you can have the house, many houses,

in your imagination.

And in those houses there are many rooms,

all waiting to be furnished and decorated.

I have a recurrent dream, perhaps it is a common one,

where I am in a house that I know well, 

 it is my own house apparently -

but I happen upon a room 

that I have either never visited,

or somehow forgotten.

Usually it is large and light,

with tall windows and fine views,

filled with beautiful furniture and fabrics,

all of which I recognise as mine.

Sometimes it has a fascinating attic,

stuffed with treasures,

it might have a garden 

with a stream running through it.

I am delighted to rediscover these houses

and sometimes a passage in a book 

brings them faintly back to my waking life.

Those pale light rooms opening out of one another,

full of bright chintzes and spring flowers -

tulips and broom and irises and rhododendron -

were at last really different from the old rooms

with their shut and curtained doors,

red carpets and rich dark covers

and tiny scattered vases of flowers.

Rising Tide by Molly Keane