Cartography

A poem by Dakota Vale

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Between the leaving and the staying the room wavers, in love with its own geometry.

I learned the floor plan with my eyes closed - which step creaked, where the door opened onto other doors, the hallway exactly as wide as my mother's patience.

They say the infected repeat their routines. They walk to jobs that no longer exist. They set tables for people who have already left.

I understand the compulsion. Some mornings I still turn left at the bottom of the stairs toward a kitchen that is now a wall in someone else's apartment.

Zarina drew straight lines. Not because she liked them but because a straight line is the shortest distance between a home and the memory of one.

I carry the floor plan folded small. Not heavy. Present. The way a hand remembers a banister it no longer needs.

The light turns the indifferent wall into a theatre of reflections. I find myself in the middle of an eye, watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless, I stay and go: I am a pause.

The gleaners walk behind the harvest. They pick up what the machine missed - a potato, an ear of corn, a door that opens onto nothing. They carry it home in their arms.

This is not a poem about loss. This is a poem about the architecture of staying in a room that has already left you.

The walls are straight. The memory is not. Between the two, the day wavers.