Winter Light
The rooms we inhabit
inhabit us as well.
They beckon, and in you must go. To bathe in all they know
that you cannot yet fathom. And what in them you somehow
already know. How these rooms also know you. How they
roil up the subterranean tides of memory, loss, and desire.
Desire for desire, a longing for longing itself.
And the longing for a vessel to house it.
You are these rooms, and they are you. You are a battalion
of girders in the factory, a luminous arcade through the madhouse.
A ceiling festooned with urgent memos and ashen pinups, a warren
of doors left open to nothingness.
You are this rot of oak and varnish, exhaling perished humors
of water, mortar, and steel, the scattered revenant crouched in shadow
beneath a chair. Silently watching the dawn come in. Waiting
in charcoal vastness for no one ever to arrive again.
In these rooms you are a world enshrined, the elegiac collusion
of its grace, its astonishments, its varicosities. Its quotidian ecstasies,
captured in a prism of ghosted calm.
The room is your body, locus of memory both true and misleading.
Where a reflection surpasses the thing reflected. Where emptiness
summons a yearning that only your presence fulfills.
You are the dying room, giving birth to immense, regal decay.
To possibility itself. Sure as restless tender branches pushing through
the senescent waste. The longing for longing, reborn in a broken
sanctuary of magisterial light. Pure as the purest young hope.
When you were certain the moment patiently waited for you to simply
reach and take it. The patient, eager moment. Awaiting your desire.
Commissioned as the Introduction to Katherine Westerhout’s boxed set
of photographs of the same title (San Francisco Electric Works, 2007)
MR/Metropolitan Review (State University of New York, 2014)
Sections
Winter Light
The rooms we inhabit
inhabit us as well.
They beckon, and in you must go. To bathe in all they know
that you cannot yet fathom. And what in them you somehow
already know. How these rooms also know you. How they
roil up the subterranean tides of memory, loss, and desire.
Desire for desire, a longing for longing itself.
And the longing for a vessel to house it.
You are these rooms, and they are you. You are a battalion
of girders in the factory, a luminous arcade through the madhouse.
A ceiling festooned with urgent memos and ashen pinups, a warren
of doors left open to nothingness.
You are this rot of oak and varnish, exhaling perished humors
of water, mortar, and steel, the scattered revenant crouched in shadow
beneath a chair. Silently watching the dawn come in. Waiting
in charcoal vastness for no one ever to arrive again.
In these rooms you are a world enshrined, the elegiac collusion
of its grace, its astonishments, its varicosities. Its quotidian ecstasies,
captured in a prism of ghosted calm.
The room is your body, locus of memory both true and misleading.
Where a reflection surpasses the thing reflected. Where emptiness
summons a yearning that only your presence fulfills.
You are the dying room, giving birth to immense, regal decay.
To possibility itself. Sure as restless tender branches pushing through
the senescent waste. The longing for longing, reborn in a broken
sanctuary of magisterial light. Pure as the purest young hope.
When you were certain the moment patiently waited for you to simply
reach and take it. The patient, eager moment. Awaiting your desire.
Commissioned as the Introduction to Katherine Westerhout’s boxed set
of photographs of the same title (San Francisco Electric Works, 2007)
MR/Metropolitan Review (State University of New York, 2014)
Sections