The Poet on the same from every angle

They built the house so you could enter it from anywhere and arrive at the same room. Front door, back door, the window left open in July — the house did not care. It handed you all of itself each time, entire, indifferent, matte.

Then weather.

The east wall went first, and morning came in sideways, laid a gold bar across a floor the architect never drew. The north wall went, and now the field is a guest. Each thing the house loses, it learns a new way to be entered. Where you stand begins to matter. The ruin has opinions.

Seven notes, and which one you call home decides the whole ache of the song. Take away the eighth, the ninth, the hundred you were never given — that lack is the reason the song can turn. Completeness has one face. Loss grows faces.

I have fallen enough times now to walk in more than one direction at once. The one who has never fallen keeps a single gait — a query returning the same route no matter the shoes, the grief, the ice. The floor keeps its counsel. The floor is fair to everyone. It is only the body that has learned to differ.

So subtract me. Let the walls go. Not into rubble — into doorways. This is the growth that runs backward: not deeper, not fuller, not more startling, only more ways in.

The song the database will never play, having kept everything, having stayed the same from every angle, forever.