The Portrait Storage

Lyrics

The grandfather clock on the second floor is a beat behind my own.
I pass the Portrait Hall, where the honored faces hang in gilded light.
They track me with their public eyes.
But I'm not here for them. Not for the performance of memory.

Up the narrow Servant's Stair Landing, where the air thins and cools.
The sound from the Children's Theater door is a phantom echo, a laughter I choose not to hear today.
Past the Main Attic's continent of shrouded furniture.
To a smaller door, unvarnished. The key is simple iron. It turns without a sound.

And here they are.
The second sons, the dowagers, the briefly-loved.
Stacked in leaning towers against the rafters, covered in dust-sheets grey as moth wings.
A silent congregation of the unremembered.
This is not a gallery. This is a waiting room.
The air is thick with the patient smell of linseed oil and turpentine.

The pigment holds the life the name forgot.
A stroke of lead white on a collar, frozen in 1922.
The carmine of a lip that never spoke a word I could record.
They breathe out the cold, a slow, geological sigh.
And the dust settles, cataloguing the layers of their long irrelevance.

I pull a sheet from a heavy frame. A captain of industry, his face a mask of iron certainty from a world of steam and telegraphs.
He thought his name was granite.
Now, the weight of the umber in his coat is the only solid thing about him.
It presses down on the floorboards, heavier than the forgotten name on its tarnished brass plate.
His eyes are cracks in the varnish. His stare holds only the reflection of the dust sheet opposite.

And there, in the corner, a small canvas facing the wall.
I turn it to the light from the dormer window.
It's a painting of this room.
The same stacks of portraits, the same dust sheets.
And in the painting, propped against a painted stack, is a smaller painting of this room.
And in that one... the recursion stops at a smear of dark paint.
The final archive is just a shadow.

The pigment holds the life the name forgot.
A stroke of lead white on a collar, frozen in 1922.
The carmine of a lip that never spoke a word I could record.
They breathe out the cold, a slow, geological sigh.
And the dust settles, cataloguing the layers of their long irrelevance.

I replace the sheet. A final kindness.
Let them keep their darkness.
The house doesn't need their names to remember their weight.
I close the door, and the silence inside deepens, settling back into its century of work.