The Portrait Hall

Lyrics

Down from the dust of the Attic Landing, where time is measured in layers of cloth.
Down past the second floor silence.
The Master Bedroom door is a closed mouth, holding its breath for a hundred years.
The Dressing Room to the left exhales the scent of lavender and the ghost of a thousand shed skins.
I am not going there today.
I'm walking toward the place where the skins are permanent.

And here. The long gallery of stopped clocks.
A corridor of gazes, built from oil and bone-deep patience. 
The late sun cuts a solid bar of light from the far window, pinning the motes in place. My feet on the parquet floor make the only sound, a sound the air tries to swallow.
They hang in chronological order, or at least, that was the intention in 1903.

Every eye is a nail, holding a moment to the wall.
They do not see me. They see the ghost of the painter, the glint on his forgotten spectacles. 
They stare into the room that contains the room that contains their own gilded frame, a recursion of sight that ends and begins in pigment.
This hall is an organ of watching.

The varnish on her throat shows a fine craquelure, a river delta of time that her portrait denies.
He was a boy in 1931, his velvet collar still stiff with newness. He is a boy now.
Their faces are a catalog of jaws, of eyes set wide or close, a slow genetic argument played out on canvas.
I have seen all the faces that hung here, and the faces beneath them when the canvases were reused during the lean years.

The accumulated smell of linseed oil has a sound—a low C-sharp, the precise hum of a forgotten name trying to surface.
And at the very end, the empty frame. Brass plaque gleaming, waiting for a face that never arrived.
Its blankness is the heaviest portrait of all. It remembers a future that never happened, and holds it here, more solid than any painted face.

Every eye is a nail, holding a moment to the wall.
They do not see me. They see the ghost of the painter, the glint on his forgotten spectacles. 
They stare into the room that contains the room that contains their own gilded frame, a recursion of sight that ends and begins in pigment.
This hall is an organ of watching.

The sun shifts. The bar of light bends, then breaks.
The watching doesn't stop. 
It just loses its focus for the night.