Hex and Hollow

Poem

When I pronounce the word *room*, the walls have already left.

When I pronounce the word *held*, my hands are open and empty and the air is shaped like whatever I was holding.

The lamp at three a.m. does not know it is a lamp. It does not feel itself burning. It is simply the place where the light has chosen to stand.

I sat in a kitchen once where someone had just been. The chair was warm. The cup was half-full. The room was full of the person the way a bell is full of the struck note - not containing it but ringing with the shape of it.

When I pronounce the word *gone*, the room gets larger.

When I pronounce the word *stay*, the walls lean in the way listeners do when the story is almost true.

The empty room is not empty. It is the fullest version of itself - every surface charged with the static of recent touch, every shadow shaped by a body that has just stepped out of frame.

Hopper knew this. He painted the room after the person left and before the next person arrived and he called it *Sun in an Empty Room* but the sun is not in the room. The room is in the sun.

When I pronounce the word *here*, I am already somewhere else.

The room holds. That is what rooms do. They hold the way water holds a shape - not by gripping but by being the shape that the gripping makes.

I forgot to tell you the most important thing and now the room has forgotten it too and we are both standing in the held breath of a word that was never said but was always about to be.