When were you ever content to stay in just a single
room in your house? You used to poke and
wander into every corner– from the cellar, with
its solitary spiders in their cottony webs, the
rusting saws and hammers and families of mice,
up into the attic, with its treasure of enigmatic
boxes, empty suitcases and someone’s wedding
tux and wedding dress pressed together in a plastic
bag beneath a rain of dust that sifted down like flour
from the rafters.
But then one day you noticed that the walls began to
splinter and collapse. You pulled down the beams one
by one and let the roof cave in. You watched the shingles
burst into the air like a flight of crows. You let the
wind blow the rugs and chairs away, the refrigerator
too. You gave away the doors and windows to
someone in Berlin you thought you loved and the
back porch to the friend in Barcelona, the one whose
hands turned into water every stone that still remained
inside your heart.
When you had finally flattened all the walls and
the house was at last a house no more,
when your fists had finally opened,
then snow poured in and moonlight, and tiny
blackened stones from Dresden, and a storm of leaves
that has been falling for a thousand years.
then you found the path that is no Path, the road that never
was a road, only light that flickers on the sand—or was it water?
Only dancing, and the sound of someone singing.
Only a song.
© 2010 J.M. Keating