It's been almost a month since I last did a version of "House Overlook". That title has always been a placeholder. The poem didn't really have a title. The first version was written in 1995. Not long before I'd written a series of poems that used houses in semi-personified fashion and I would title them "House of ...", as in "House of Rescue" and "House of Escape" and "House of Dimensions" and so on. "House Overlook" was a late edition to the series. It probably works better as a part of a series than as a stand-alone. But I like it well enough by itself.
With this version the poem now has a title, "All the Time Now". I like it as a phrase. As the title? I don't know. I'll let it sit there awhile and see how it settles in.
The changes from version 4 are mainly in the arrangement of lines. Stanzas 2 and 3 swapped places, for instance. I adjusted the perspective of the speaker slightly, emphasizing his being one who looks, a commonality with the house and a difference. The house overlooks. To overlook means to fail to notice and to supervise, to get a good view, to be prominent. The house is stationary, as a house is. The speaker moves about, even to moving to another country. Although in this other country, the houses aren't stationary? The speaker was not busy in the country of the overlooking house? That's implied by the last line. Was his lack of busy-ness somehow caused by the house's overlooking? Is "the house" another way of saying "I"?
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