The Taxidermy Room

Lyrics

Up from the second floor, past the closed door of the Master Bedroom.
The air thick with sleep and perfume.
I turn away from the Portrait Hall, from all those patient, painted faces.
Their stillness is a lie.
The real stillness is higher up.
Up the narrow stairs to the Attic Landing, where the air thins to dust and memory.
Past the Broken Things Room, past the Box Room.
To this door.
And the door opens.
Here. The real hush.
A parliament of held breaths.
A fox, mid-pounce, for a century.
A great horned owl, wings spread for a flight that never comes.
Every pose is the last pose.
A museum of the final nerve.
The scent of cedar and mothballs is a low, protective hum.
And under it, something else. A chemical sharpness.
That smell has a sound, you see.
A high, thin note, the precise color of old glass.
It's the sound of instinct ending its report.
The sound of the wildness being filed away, forever.
This one, the badger, the tag says 1928.
But I remember the fight. I can feel the ghost-heat of it under the cold fur.
Or maybe I just gave it that memory because it looked unfinished.
This room holds the hunt that happened, and the hunt that should have been.
They are the same archive now.
The stag contains the forest, the fox contains the chase.
Each a smaller, silent version of a world that is gone.
The glass eyes watch me.
Two hundred glass eyes, and not one of them blinks.
Each one a perfect, black mirror.
I see myself, small and trapped inside them.
A visitor in their kingdom of perfect stillness.
They hold the last light they never saw, and now they hold me.
The only thing moving here is the dust.
The only hunter is the light, touching everything, taking nothing.
I close the door softly.
The stillness is safe. For now.