The View

Lyrics

The final staircase. Not wood, but iron.
It spirals up toward a circle of grey light.
The air thins. The scent of ozone and distance.
One hundred floors, or just five. The count blurs at the end.

I left the grand stair behind, turned my back on the Foyer's polished silence.
Up past the second floor, the long gaze of the Portrait Hall.
All those captured seconds, holding their breath as I pass.
I feel the pull of the Wife's Sitting Room, a ghost of lilac, but I don't pause.
The heart of the house has had its say.

Up again. The narrow flight, the servant's path to memory.
The attic breathes dust and dry paper.
A glimpse through the door of the Newspaper Archive, history stacked and yellowing.
Past the Map and Chart Room, where the world was made flat and obedient.
I touch the lock of the Sealed Attic Room. The last unopened question.
And then, this final door. Not a room, but an exit.

The door swings open and the house falls away behind me.
There is only the wind, the height, and the great, indifferent sky.
This is not a room. This is the release from rooms.
This is the house learning it is small.
The hundred years, a single, complex exhalation.
And now, silence.

The iron railing is cold, real. A line drawn against the fall.
I see the forest that was here before the first stone was laid.
I see the ghost of the surveyor, pacing out lines that would become walls.
The sound of the wind rounding the chimney has the exact weight of the sandstone they quarried in 1923.
A sound you can feel in your bones. The bedrock speaking.

Down there, the palimpsest. The first gas lamps of the town, pinpricks in the dark.
The headlights of cars in 1960, sweeping across the fields that are now subdivisions.
The town breathes in, breathes out. Factories rise and rust.
I can see the hairline cracks that will form in the foundation a century from now.
The slow, patient return of the green.
This house is a parenthesis in a language I have always known.

And from here, the whole structure is a diagram of itself.
A blueprint laid upon the earth.
I see the dark square of the Sealed Room in the basement, its secret kept.
I see the tiny tangle of The Nest, high on the opposite corner.
Each of the ninety-eight other rooms, a pulse of faint, remembered light.
The mansion contains the memory. The view contains the mansion.

The sun is setting. Or rising. It is always doing both.
The great clock inside the house has finally stopped ticking.
The view doesn't end.
It just waits.