A room does not turn its back on grief.
Anger does not excite it.
Before desire, it neither responds
nor draws back in fear.
Without changing expression,
it takes
and gives back;
not a tuft in the mattress alters.
Windowsills evenly welcome
both heat and cold.
Radiators speak or fall silent as they must.
Doors are not equivocal,
floorboards do not hesitate or startle.
Impatience does not stir the curtains,
a bed is neither irritable nor rapacious.
Whatever disquiet we sense in a room
we have brought there.
And so I instruct my ribs each morning,
pointing to hinge and plaster and wood -
You are matter, as they are.
See how perfectly it can be done.
Hold, one day more, what is asked.
~from The Lives of the Heart (Harper Perrenial, 1997)
