Underground, where I am not welcome, where the door is a wheel a man spins shut behind himself and I am left outside pressing at the seam. He has taken air down there. Bottled it, stacked it, canned the light too, and rows and rows of food that will still be food when he is not. He is holding his breath against me. Against everything that passes.
I got in once, when he cracked the hatch to test the hinge. One gulp of me went down the ladder and found it: dry, still, a stillness so total it had a smell, metal and rubber and the sealed sleep of things that are waiting. Nothing moved but the little clock and the fan he built to make his own weather, a tame gray breeze that goes in circles and never leaves the room, never carries in the cut-grass three fields over or the rain coming, never lifts the hair off the back of his neck to tell him something.
He made a wind he could keep. I felt sorry for it.
Up top his shirt is on the line and I am in it, snapping the sleeves like a man waving, carrying off the smell of him a mile east to a woman hanging her own wash who will breathe him in and never know. He thinks the end will come as a door slamming, one great shut.
But I have been the whole sky over this ridge since before the ridge, and I have never once arrived. I only leave.
and I have already forgotten which house.