The Ballroom Anteroom

Lyrics

Down the long axis of the house. First floor.
The doors are intentions. The Study, closed on its sums. The Music Room, holding a chord that resolved in 1932. A glance down the passage to The Back Hall, a geometry of service, unseen.
There is no need to hurry. The destination is not a room, but the preparation for a room.
The air cools three degrees. Here.

This is the space before the space. A valve. A lens.
Its only function is to hold a perfect, silent image of what comes next.
Not walls, but four surfaces for reflection. Not a room, but a frame.
The ballroom is over there, through the mahogany. But the ballroom is also here, flat and cold, trapped in the gilt and the glass.

A path is worn into the Persian runner. Not a history of footsteps, but a diagram of velocity, a line of intention drawn from threshold to threshold.
The marble-topped table is a pedestal for nothing. The vase upon it holds only the reflection of the unlit chandelier in the next room. It holds the idea of light.
And here, a single pearl button, a flaw in the parquet. A focal point that disrupts the parallax. It doesn't remember a glove. It only marks a coordinate on the floor's grid. A period at the end of a sentence that was never written.

The silence in here has a weight. I can feel it on my skin.
It has the specific gravity of polished marble.
The smell of old floor wax is the color of that silence, a transparent amber with no source.

This is the space before the space. A valve. A lens.
Its only function is to hold a perfect, silent image of what comes next.
Not walls, but four surfaces for reflection. Not a room, but a frame.
The ballroom is over there, through the mahogany. But the ballroom is also here, flat and cold, trapped in the gilt and the glass.

The room contains a smaller, silent version of the room to come.
It is the catalogue that lists only one item: itself, reflected.
This is a preface made of air and light.
The music hasn't started. It will never start in here.
The doors remain closed. The promise is enough.