The Halls

Five more books in a box to be carried out to the car;

your office door closes behind you and at that moment

you turn invisible—not even a ghost in that hall

from the hall’s point of view.

If the halls don’t know you, the halls and the rooms

of the buildings where you worked for seven years—

if the halls don’t know you,

and they don’t—

some new woman or two new men come clattering

down these halls in the month after your departure, indeed

just two days after you left forever

they come clattering with ideas about

the relation between mind and body or will and fate

filled with hormones of being the chosen workers here

and they feel as if the halls and rooms begin to recognize them,

accept them, as if there is a belonging in the world—

but these new workers are wrong, the halls don’t know

who is working under the unobtrusive fluorescent panels:

this is appalling and for a minute you are appalled

though your being so now is not an event

in the life of your new rented house or even

your new condominium . . .

So if they don’t, if they don’t know you,

the halls, the walls, the fixtures,

then what? Then there is for you

no home in that rock, no home in the mere rock of

where you work, where you briskly walk, not even

in the bed where your body sleeps alone or not—

so if there is to be a place for you, for you

it must not be located in plaster and tile and space,

it will have to be in that other house,

the one whose door you felt opening just last night

when you dialed from memory and your friend picked up the phone.

Source: Selfwolf (The University of Chicago Press, 1999)