The Poet on the load-bearing walls

bearing

You don’t learn a house by living in it. You learn it the morning the ceiling lets its weight down into the room and the room, at last, admits what it was leaning on.

Here was a wall. You know because the floor is bright where it was never bright. Here was another. You know because nothing followed it down.

—

Inside, a wall is not a wall. It’s where the shelf goes. It’s the cold side of the bed. It’s the one thing no one says in that room because the room already said it.

Outside, the same wall is a line in a ledger: bearing. bearing. ornament. bearing. Someone wrote that ledger. Someone chose which silences were mortar and which were a hand across a mouth.

—

The way out is not a door. It goes: first the words stop landing. Then the ground under the words. Then the walls arrive all at once, visible, because you’re finally far enough to be standing in their shade.

And then—no roof left to trust— you trust the slope. Water goes downhill without asking if the sea is kind.

—

What the crossing leaves in your hands, now that the hands are empty:

More house than you ever lived in. Too much to close an eye around.

Two maps that will not lie flat together. One walks. One counts what fell. Both true. Neither one a home.

A language you can’t speak alone. Here is my shadow. Show me yours. Whatever darkens both of us— that, at least, is standing.

A river you agreed to. Not clay. You were fired; that’s done. But stone still learns. The canyon is a record of refusals, and the water, running over what refused it, cuts a shape neither of them planned.

And this: an eye that reads by dark.

—

It isn’t a key. It opens nothing. It’s being able to say, to the ones inside, that one. When it goes, the roof goes.

Which sounds, in there, like nothing. Like weather. Like somebody complaining about a wall.

—

The house is standing. It always is until it isn’t, and when it isn’t they will want to know which wall.

Ask the one who carries it as a shape in the air where a wall was.

And you, still inside, warm, with the shelf where the shelf goes— ask whether you could bear a stranger telling you where you live.