From the stack of books beside my bed, I thumb some page each night to help my sleep. I like to know another juggler's there. Tonight, it's Hopper. What he painted last, what illusion, what distllation, what he did to mark each day the sun, that solitaire, subtracts its deviled patch, a shrinking rug that leaves no trace, no horizontal finger.
A footless sound retreats somewhere, a door is shut, a shut-in weathers in the room that hosts the mind, a pallid shiverer.
Something breathes behind the ordinary slat we call a door. No squabble with a lover, or world lingers there, or leaks from transoms. But nothing being heard within's no proof that nothing's there. Wind slights the real or imagined glass just the same as if glass weren't there, an illusory disjunction between day, and day receding from the anteroom, or reliquary.
January, that hare, its ruff like a collar spiked to fend off weather, fate, a talisman, battery of wind, its ilk of lies.
Every season has its animal, its animal mind, its pellucid eye.
Sun in an Empty Room by Sandra Stone
