The Sealed Room

Lyrics

From the Attic Landing, where dust remembers sunlight. 
Down.
Past the second floor Hallway Window Seat, its glass gone cold.
Down past the Library, where all the books are indexed except one. 
I don't go into the Sick Room today. That door is closed enough.
Down the Servant's Stair, a path worn into the wood. The first floor is a murmur. 
The basement breathes. 
Past the Furnace Corridor's iron breath, to the end of the line. 
Where the blueprint lied. 
There is no handle. No keyhole. No threshold to cross. 
Only a wall where a door was drawn, and then erased with plaster.
This is the Sealed Room. 
The final word in an argument no one recalls. 
It is not a space, but a cessation. 
A joint in the house's memory, soldered shut. 
It holds nothing. It holds the reason for holding nothing.
The new plaster is smooth, but a different age from the brick. 
I remember the trowel's scrape in 1924, or the silence that came just after. 
The dust motes here have never danced in a draft. They are monuments. 
The chill from the wall is specific. Not from stone, but from a decision.
Sometimes, I press my ear to the wall. 
The silence from within has a color. It is the hard, flat white of a page before the ink. 
And inside the room, I know, is a perfect model of this house. 
And in that model, this room is also sealed. And inside that one… a smaller forgetting.
The seam is a scar. The scar is a spine. 
The house is built around this exact absence. 
The air does not move. 
The lock is the wall itself.