The Trunk Room

Lyrics

Down from the light.
Past the floors of breath and argument.
The weight of the house settles here.
One hundred years of gravity.

I leave the echo of the Foyer, the polished floor reflecting a sky I won't see again today.
Down the narrow stairs behind the Butler's Pantry, where the air turns cool and smells of earth.
The basement corridor stretches out.
To the left, the low hum of the Furnace Corridor, a pocket of manufactured summer.
To the right, the absolute zero of The Sealed Room. I don't look that way.
Not today.
My path is the middle one. The one that ends at a simple pine door with an iron ring for a handle.

The air is a solid thing. Cedar, mothballs, the ghost of mildew from a long-forgotten rain in 1919.
They are all here. The caskets of departure.
Twelve coffins for journeys that are over.
Hartmann, Racine, Wisconsin. Monogram E.T., for a man who is now only initials on a gravestone.
They stand like sleeping animals, their brass locks gone dull.
Their leather hides are maps of baggage car scrapes and indifferent handlers on a dozen dead steamship lines.

They hold the silence after the ticket was punched.
They hold the weight of the clothes that were never worn again.
This is the archive of destinations, the terminal of intent.
A room full of endings, stacked to the ceiling.
Each lock a period. Each strap a final binding.

This canvas duffel remembers the mud of the Marne, 1918.
It doesn't remember the boy who carried it.
This hatbox holds the shape of a social call in a city of gaslight and horses.
The silk is perfect. The world it belonged to is not.
One trunk holds a manifest of its own contents, written in a sloping hand in 1934.
The last entry. After that, the inventory is only silence.

And here. Tucked inside this one, a single left-hand glove, size seven and a half.
Monogram M.V.
Inside its thumb, a ferry ticket from 1923.
A journey of minutes, not miles, preserved with more care than all the grand tours.
I lift it, and the scent of cedar dust becomes the sound of a ship's horn across the water.
The smell of mothballs is the cold spray on a wooden rail.
A moment that never happened, or happened so completely it burned itself into the memory of the room itself.

They hold the silence after the ticket was punched.
They hold the weight of the clothes that were never worn again.
This is the archive of destinations, the terminal of intent.
A room full of endings, stacked to the ceiling.
Each lock a period. Each strap a final binding.

The elevated train rattles the window, five floors up.
A telegram from a world that is still moving.
The trunks do not answer.
They have arrived.