January 13th: Who Are You, Making Room?
And what does the room know of her outward bravery and
It’s hard adornment?
John Hollander
“Behind the Beaux-Arts”
Maybe it’s the one desire we don’t know we’re born compulsed to
do: take into our own two hands our clay our stone
our sawn bones of oak laid low to plainer and frame
a room one room that bears us out of the womb of it:
sluice by bloody sluice of this wet clay and grain coming alive
under our touch and where we start is entirely
our own signature. For me, even before it is the hovering
almost reluctant touch: scent by nose and throat
and though I am no lion, through the crowd I’d know
smelling you, I’d go for the mouth first and worse
the tongue of your wet warm words and nose over
your fence of teeth, ignore the broke, the capped, and go
straight for the root of your room: taste how you see,
high as you are, the edges of paintings coming undone
from their skin of gild. But for how they’re hung it’s not
the color but blood on my tongue: some we take to bed
only once and still: all the planks have breathed beneath
the roof in the house all winter. The heat’s been on and they,
after all those clearing days, long log haul days, come into
the blade days, wait in the yard days they come
together in the room you’ll make a room for me in: OHHH
but go slow old man, please with your lips and raise
no splinter before you fit and fit and fit doves and tongues
all sawn by hand in your room now gone mostly to dust
in your room above us falling on youmewee falling once
as stone or glass blown or wood toned bone by bone by bone
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