The Poet on opacity is positional

Walking Around the House

0°

Stand where the stone expects you. From here the house is all face: shutters closed, the cornice polite, a greeting with nobody behind it.

This isn’t blindness. It’s hospitality. The house has put out a chair on the one spot from which nothing shows through.

12°

Take one step left on the cobbles. The wall hasn’t changed, but now a faint light comes through it: a coat, or a man, standing on the other side of milk.

Stay here a year and you’ll know that coat down to its buttons. Every button will be wrong in the same direction.

40°

Now it’s the man. Now it’s neither: a lamp, a heron, a hinge. Don’t choose. Lay one shadow over the other and look at the seam where they won’t line up.

That seam is the most honest thing you’ve learned today. It has the shape of the glass.

the one who stays at 0°

He says I know it’s a facade and he’s right, and he hasn’t moved his feet. He only turned the chair around to face the street.

the lens, tilted

Take off your glasses. Tilt them toward the window.

There’s the smear where you’ve looked at ten thousand sparrows, and the clean rim where you never glanced. Your seeing has a coastline.

You thought you were looking through fog. You were looking through a map of where you’ve always looked.

Tilting them leaves a smudge too, but it’s a sideways smudge, a new way of being wrong.

the first facade

The one with eyes. You won’t read it tonight.

Come back at breakfast. Come back at the graveside, and in the second when it forgets you’re in the room.

Walk the long way around a person. It takes years. That’s the method.

360°

The house never opens. You never get in.

What you get is the walk, the pile of wrong shadows, each one wrong in its own shape, and between them a house you know better than anyone standing at the door.

Wherever you see only wall, look down. Ask who set the chair there.