The Parlor

Lyrics

I enter from The Foyer, where the weather of the world is left behind.
Past the open door to The Drawing Room, a flicker of light, a memory of laughter.
I will not look toward The Dining Room today; the ghost of clattering silver is too sharp.
I stop here, at the threshold that was built for crossing, for presentation. The door that was meant to always be open.

The air is thick, not with dust, but with posture.
That scent of beeswax over century-old lemon oil. The horsehair in the divan holding its breath.
On a small table by the window, there is a dollhouse, a perfect miniature of this room.
Inside it, a smaller table, a tinier dollhouse. A recursion of waiting for a guest who will never arrive.

This is the Parlor, the antechamber of the heart.
It is not a room for speaking, but a library of every word spoken within it.
Every careful inquiry, every structured lie, every pause that lasted a second too long.
The damask wallpaper recorded the vibrations. The chairs are an audience that never went home.

I see the Victorian gloom of 1924 layered over the stark, hopeful beige of 1961.
A woman in furs who died before the house was finished argues with a boy in a polyester suit from 1983.
I remember her, or I remember the room's memory of her portrait. The distinction closed long ago.
The subject of their argument is a vase of flowers that only exists in the hypothetical tense.

And the silence here is not an absence. It is a collection of objects.
The silence after the telegram came in 1944 had the flat, gray color of a winter sea.
It pooled on the floor and has never evaporated. It has weight.
Louder still are the confessions never made, the proposals held back at the last moment. They became the pattern on the rug.

I kneel by the little dollhouse parlor.
I look through its tiny window.
And see a smaller me, kneeling, looking into an even smaller room.
And the silence inside that room is listening to us all.