The Gun Room

Lyrics

I move down the main spine, past the public face.
Past the Study where the leather chairs hold old arguments in their seams.
The door to the Smoking Room is shut tight on its ghosts of blue air.
I follow a cold current from the Back Hall, a scent that pulls me toward the bone of the house.
Toward the quietest room.
And here. The air changes.
It's cool, smelling of oil and cedar, patience and metal.
A library of purposes, shelved and silent.
The walnut stocks of the rifles drink the dim light from the high window, their blued steel asleep.
Each one a sentence waiting for a verb.
This is the room that contains the forest.
The polished wood remembers the grain of the living tree, the slow pull of sap.
The glass eyes of the stags mounted on the wall are not looking in.
They are looking out.
Through them, the winter woods watch us. The silence in here is their silence.
The brass cleaning rods stand in their rack, a promise of ritual and care.
The leather cases, scarred with travel, hold the exact shape of what they protect.
On one shelf, a single left-handed glove from 1923, its fingers curled as if remembering a grip.
Whose hand? The rifle doesn't know. The trigger doesn't care.
The instinct is older than any name.
The smell of the solvent on a cleaning cloth... it has a color.
It is the precise, impossible green of moss on a north-facing stone in a ravine I have never walked.
I remember the kick against my shoulder from a shot I never fired.
The clean, sharp report that never was.
The memory is perfect, stored in the wood and plaster, waiting for a body to inhabit it.
This is the room that contains the forest.
The polished wood remembers the grain of the living tree, the slow pull of sap.
The glass eyes of the stags mounted on the wall are not looking in.
They are looking out.
Through them, the winter woods watch us. The silence in here is their silence.
I close the door. The lock finds its home with a solid click.
A hundred heartbeats stilled in their racks.
Waiting.
The forest, contained, keeps watch.