Carolina Quarterly

"A Narrow House" by Barry Spacks

summer 2002 vol. 54, no. 3

There’s many a famous narrow house
in Amsterdam, rooms piled in a stack,

“THE NARROW HOUSE, BUILT IN 1604,”
something like that on the history plaque.

Basement kitchen, sitting room next,
then Master’s place, and at the top

Madam’s room viewing chimney pots
with Master there in her narrow bed

with his narrow smile that makes her laugh
so she joins him as swifts in the Amsterdam sky

swirl night’s overture like a corps de ballet
and nothing is heard but the sounds of joy

behind slanted windows, on the topmost floor
of a narrow house, in Amsterdam, in 1604.

Barry Spacks, Professor of Humanities at MIT from 1960 to 1981, teaches in the English Department and the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He has published two novels, various short stories, essays, reviews, and seven poetry collections, the most extensive of which is Spacks Street: New and Selected Poems, from Johns Hopkins. His CD presentation of forty-two selected poems, A Private Reading, came out in October 2000.