Rooms

“My father’s house has many rooms”

—John 14:2

I wake to the engine rev of a car en route. A fly breaks my eye’s momentum, and lures me to the window. It was raining while I dreamed of thunder, like a ghost story with a perfectly logical explanation.

*

Nothing is the cause of these clouds. I’ve endured my life as a man in another man’s image. You must move very fast in order to stay in the same place. I mark my location on a map as if someone were trying to find me.

*

The room gets dark before I notice it. Moonlight—a rope but a rope that can’t be climbed—expands to fill a window, a body confined to a room takes on the spirit of the room. Exit is only a sign.

*

All desire is for nothing namable. I am filled with tongues.

*

A payer: on my knees again, ready for a blow.

*

A voice is lost across the noisy room. A boy throws a coin into the empty well.

*

I am toy soldiers on the windowsill.

*

Where have I begun? Where am I beginning and in whose maim?In naming I am named. One thousand miles away the rain is falling in the middle of the ocean whose surface a stick figure floats.

*

The leaves are always falling or in flux, just as I am not what I asked for, no longer the boy to whom my father gave his name. My wounds are my own.

*

Father, dad, can you see how small your son has become?

*

What is a destination? Once I believed (I was a destination).

*

Hunger is the first reason to say I. Another room, another small window. An even smaller body.

*

Had a boy not loved his god he would not know what the trapeze artist knows: every fall is a thrill.

*

Is getting lost only ever accidental? Would you take me back under different circumstances?

*

The airplane moves parallel to the houses below it. A cat drifts like trash across the grass. Inside: a single candle flickers, or a finger points up. How long have I been praying?

*

In loneliness also there are many rooms.

*

For a long while a child chases a marble rolling down the road.

*

The spoons have clattered. The trees dismember themselves in a gale. The stars scatter like stray nails on which nothing can be hung.

*

Distances in the window collapse: a moth on the glass moves across the glass travels faster than a truck in the background. The city lights are stacked. Boats floating on top of other boats.

*

This tongue (never mine) has withered but never leaves me.

*

At any given time, most rooms in the world are empty. Memory: whose room was this and whose is it now?

*

I remember a certain voice I do not know whether I heard it.

*

Light is a type of weather occuring outside of a house. My shadow is larger than I remember it. A dog is barking several houses away but in what direction I cannot say.

*

I require many candles to keep the room bright, but only one to burn it down.

C Dylan Bassett is a teaching fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of The Unpainted Shore (Spark Wheel, 2015) and The Invention of Monsters / Plays for the Theater (Plays Inverse, 2015), and six additional chapbooks. His recent poems are published or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Columbia Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, H_NGM_N, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Salt Hill, West Branch and elsewhere.