Reverie
I have long since ceased
to distinguish habit from pilgrimage.
Each evening,
when daylight gathers its immaculate ledgers
and departs without so much
as balancing my name among its accounts,
I inherit,
for the brief republic of twilight,
a country whose cartographers
have never once consulted the earth.
There,
the staircases possess
the gracious vanity
of remembering every footstep
that has ever trusted them.
Windows retain
the last gold syllables of afternoon
as though light were less an occurrence
than a beloved guest
lingering over one final cup of tea.
Nothing hurries.
Not the clocks
whose hands concern themselves
with courtesy rather than arithmetic
nor the conversations,
which conclude only after silence
has been properly introduced
to every soul in the room.
One is never interrupted there.
One is merely awaited.
What an extravagant mercy,
to arrive somewhere
already expected.
Morning, however,
has always mistaken punctuality
for virtue.
It enters
with its immaculate cuffs,
its officious keyring
of obligations,
its incurable preference
for measurable things.
The cities I erected overnight
their verandas fragrant
with impossible jasmine,
their libraries still warm
from the fingerprints of unwritten lives
are dismantled
brick by reverent brick,
until nothing remains
but another ordinary room,
another ordinary mirror,
another face
persuading itself
that endurance
is indistinguishable from living.
By noon,
weariness has resumed
its hereditary office.
It settles upon my shoulders
with the familiar authority
of an ancestral garment,
hemmed generations ago
for sorrows
I have somehow inherited
without the accompanying names.
They call it indolence.
A pleasing word,
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indolence
all polished vowels
and immaculate ignorance.
It has never been asked
to spend an entire night
constructing a sanctuary
from materials
the waking world refuses to manufacture.
It has never awakened
to the ecclesiastical labour
of dismantling hope
before breakfast,
lest someone mistake it
for impracticality.
They imagine
that I disappear
into reverie.
The truth
is altogether less romantic.
It is the only province
in which I possess
the ordinary citizenship
of being seen.
There,
my silences
are not translated into absence.
Fatigue
is not cross-examined
until it confesses laziness.
Even grief,
having removed
its ceremonial attire,
is invited to sit,
to warm its hands
about the kettle,
to say nothing at all.
And no one,
not once,
mistakes that silence
for emptiness.
Twilight will return.
It always does
bearing beneath its lavender sleeves
the discreet amnesty
of another impossible evening.
I shall go with it,
as faithfully
as tide obeys the moon.
Not because I have entertained
the childish ambition
that those impossible dominions
might someday petition
for admission into reality.
Reality has never been
their vocation.
No -
I return
because somewhere
beyond the competent jurisdiction
of daylight,
there remains
a small,
improbable country
which continues,
against every sensible expectation,
to reserve
a place at the table
before I have even begun
my journey home.
