It sounds like the cracks and clicks of the house settling
as the room warms in morning, it sounds like a fan
whispered up. It tastes of wood smoke — sweet and then stale.
It looks like the curve of a mountain
under streaked sky, and everything pale blue
just before sunrise, everything translucent,
even stone. The stone is blue, it tastes, after all,
like tea in a glass cup, it feels like wanting a
blanket on your lap, nesting, hovering around
a wound, no a break, where the mountain opens,
wanting to heal, to soften the gap, to close it,
like an empty room inside of me, and I want to give it fire
and fill it with humming, and make it hum
and vibrate — the resound of a chamber
opened and filled with air — with beating.
I want to fill the gap
but it keeps opening, pressing
inside to outside, unhousing
and unseeding the husk of me.
I am not a house with an empty room,
a broken window in a wall.
I am not sleep battered open by a dream,
not even a mountain turning solid again
as light rises, I am not a cave in the mountain. I
am not I — that’s what it feels like
today, waking alone in late winter. A spider
hanging her web in the doorjamb, spinning in three
dimensions — to catch what passes,
trembling with capture, all wet and shine,
moments when everything is a door.