In the Corridor

I passed through, I should have paused,

there were a hundred doors. One opened.

In there, someone whose name

is not yet known to me lived out

his middle years in simple terms, two chairs,

one place laid for early breakfast, one plate

with dry toast and butter softening. There

his mind raced through writings

he had memorized long ago while he tried

to get hold of himself. Once

in his youth he had studied with love

in the corners of old paintings

matrices of fields and towns,

passages intricate and particular, wheat,

columns, figures and ground,

classically proportioned

in lines that were meant

to meet, eventually,

at vanishing point. They continued,

nevertheless; they troubled the eye.

He collected sets of books printed

in the nineteenth century, unyielding

pages, memoirs of the poets,

engravings of rurified private subjects

in times of public sector unhappiness,

frescoes of human oddity in gatefold printing.

Why does it continue

to chasten me, he says to no one.

It does. It is a painful mistaking,

this setting something down,

saying aloud, “it is nothing yet”

when he’d meant, not anything—

but then nothing peered

through the keyhole, nothing

took possession. Snow on the roofs,

snow in traces on the ground,

passersby with wet trouser-cuffs

looking to the pavement as the hill rises,

light gathering in the river

and gradually spreading.