The Back Hall

Lyrics

I leave the warmth of the Kitchen, the ghost of baked bread on the air.
Through the Scullery, past the deep sink where the water in the pipes is always cold.
I don't turn toward the Butler's Pantry today. That's a different kind of quiet, a silence that waits to be of service.
The great door to the Dining Room stays shut. A monument to a meal cleared away hours ago, or was it years?
And then the threshold. The temperature drops five degrees.

This is the Back Hall. Not a room, but a purpose.
A straight line drawn in dust motes and shadows, connecting work to the outside world.
The one bare bulb hums a note of tired, fly-specked yellow.
The floor is cold through my shoes, a draft from the floorboards that remembers the winter of 1947.

And here. The scuff mark. A black comma worn into the floor.
Twenty-three inches from the last, a ghost of a footprint beside it.
The turn he always made, without thinking.
A body's memory, a daily ritual ground into the linoleum until it became geography.
The house keeps the count. The house remembers the rhythm.

I remember this floor as bare wood, the particular pattern of the grain near the baseboard.
I remember the smell of lye soap on a Saturday morning in 1931.
The sound of the pantry key turning in its distant lock had the sharp, rectangular shape of a sugar cube dissolving on the tongue.
He’d carry it, that key. His pocket worn to a pale circle.

This hall is a corridor that contains a memory of every walk ever taken down it.
It sees its own long reflection in the dusty glass of the transom light above the Mud Room door.
I don't recall his face now. Just the weight of his tread, the specific cadence.
Maybe the house invented him just to explain the mark. I can't be sure the difference matters anymore.

Right here. The scuff mark. A dark pivot in the long, plain sentence of the hall.
Twenty-three inches from the last. The turn we all still make, feeling for his groove in the floor.
A body's memory worn into the bone of the house itself.
The house keeps the count. The house is the rhythm.

Just a line.
From work, to the outside.
From the heat, to the cold.