The Drawing Room

Lyrics

Down the wide staircase, my hand on the banister, cold and smooth.
Each step is a century.
The Foyer below is a tiled lake, my reflection ripples across it.
I turn away from The Parlor, its door shut tight on its formal grief.
Not today. Never today.
I am pulled here instead. To the room for being seen.

The air is tall in here. The ceiling is miles away.
Dust motes dance in the gray light from the windows, a slow, silent waltz.
I smell cold beeswax from the floorboards, a clean and patient scent.
This room was a stage. A place to present the family face, the acceptable truth.
You sat here. On this velvet settee.
Horsehair stuffing, springs that sighed under your weight in 1927.

I trace the shape of you against the deep green velvet.
The ghost of an impression.
Did you feel like a ghost even then?
They said you embroidered the wrong initial on the antimacassar. A perfect, scrolling 'Q'.
A quiet rebellion, a secret name.
Or maybe just a mistake you never corrected.
I look for it now, but it’s gone. Or it was never there at all.
And the difference closed a long time ago.

This is the Drawing Room, where we draw the curtains on the afternoon.
Where we draw a breath before we speak the careful lie.
Where I draw your face from the thin air, from the memory of a scent.
In the room built for showing, I am here for what was hidden.
I am drawing myself out of the frame.

That smell of beeswax…
it has a sound. A low E-flat of loneliness.
It is the precise chord of a name whispered in an empty hall.
I look at the silver tea service on the mahogany desk.
Polished to a painful shine.
And in the side of the creamer, a face looks back at me.
Her eyes are not my eyes.
Her hair is pinned in the style of 1949.
She smiles a sad, knowing smile, then vanishes into the glare.

On the marble mantelpiece, a small, perfect model of this very room.
A dollhouse room for a dollhouse.
And inside it, a tiny figure sits on a tiny velvet settee.
Her head is bowed, I can't see her face.
But I know she is looking at a smaller model on her own mantelpiece.
And on and on, until it is too small to see.
Until it is just a point of dust in the light.

This is the Drawing Room, where we draw the curtains on the afternoon.
Where we draw a breath before we speak the careful lie.
Where I draw your face from the thin air, from the memory of a scent.
In the room built for showing, I am here for what was hidden.
I am drawing myself out of the frame.

I sit on the settee.
The springs sigh.
I am the guest that never leaves.
I am the initial that was never embroidered.
I am the quiet.