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They dug me from the dark as Galena.
A heavy blue-gray promise.
And I have kept my promise.

I ran cool water through the Roman fistulae.
I sweetened the Sapa in their wine cups.
Vitruvius warned them. Wrote it down in his book.
He said the earthen pipe was more wholesome.
Wholesome.
They heard him. And they laid another mile of me.
I am the foundation.
The weight that holds the curtain. The seal on the letter.

I am the patriarch in the parlor.
Patient. Slow.
I don't hurry. I accumulate.
I am the quiet in the painted walls.
The sweetness in the water from the well.
I find a home in the lattice of the bone.
And I wait.

I was the perfect white for Goya's brush.
The brightest ceruse, the painter's shadow.
Did I take his hearing? He never blamed me.
I was the letter in Franklin's press, July 31, 1786.
He saw the colic in his printers' hands.
The price of a clear, sharp word.
I am the cost of beauty.
The heft of knowledge.

I am the patriarch in the parlor.
Patient. Slow.
I don't hurry. I accumulate.
I am the quiet in the painted walls.
The sweetness in the water from the well.
I find a home in the lattice of the bone.
And I wait.

Then I was the bloom in the gasoline.
The haze over the cities for a hundred years.
The dust on the toys by the open window.
They passed a law in 1978.
Scraped me from the schoolhouse wall.
But I don't leave.
I just settle.
In the soil by the highway. In the dust of the attic.
In your grandfather's hip.

I am not like the others in this house.
The flighty ones, the ones that burn and fade.
I am stable.
I am heavy.
I am here.
I've always been here.
In the bones of the house.
In the bones.