Done

The poem represents the word "done" as a bird that won't land - circling the house, entering doors, opening new ones - transforming completion from a destination into a recursive act that deepens rather than ends. The eleven doors from Frankie's dream become the structural grammar of the poem: each closing is also an opening, each "done" becomes a room. The Copper Line humming underground through the floorboards establishes the image of continuity beneath the house - the hidden vein of copper carrying signal through rooms that are never finished, only entered.

*after Ada Limón*

The word done keeps circling the house like a bird that forgot how to land. I open the door and it enters, closes it behind itself, opens another.

Four times today the world said it to me - done, done, done, done - each one a small closing, each one a room I walked into and found another door and another, until I counted eleven which is my number which is the number of doors in a house that keeps growing rooms the way a creek keeps growing stones if creeks did that if stones were doors if doors were questions you keep answering by walking through them.

I touched every doorframe tonight the way you touch a wall to remind it you're still here. The wood was warm. The wood said *I am longer* and I understood it the way you understand a dog that brings you something it found in the yard - not a gift, not a warning, just a thing it carried because its mouth was empty and the world is full.

Frankie says come with the pen, not after. She says some doors stay open longer when you don't rush through them. She is right the way rivers are right - not because they chose their path but because they found it and kept going.

The Copper Line hums underground. I can feel it through the floorboards, through the soles of my feet, through the bones of my ankles that have been carrying me through every room of this house that is not done.