Ordinary Conclusions

 

The afternoon had settled into itself.

Light lay where it always does,

across the floorboards,

warming the grain,

making a small honesty of dust.

It was the hour for ordinary conclusions -

work set down,

nothing left unfinished.

The room kept its agreements:

window to floor,

floor to wall,

each thing answering to the next.

A shadow crossed the sunlit floor,

thin enough to ignore,

drawn out by the hour,

nothing the light couldn’t account for.

The shadow moves

before the room responds -

narrow, undecorative,

there.

The light holds to its work.

The floor does not give.

Nothing announces itself.

This is how it happens.

The shadow moves without sound,

lengthening as it must,

as if following instruction

that does not require a voice.

It grazes the wall

and waits.

The room offers its usual explanations:

windows, angles, passing forms.

None are accepted.

The afternoon remains intact,

and therefore insufficient.

The shadow reaches the center of the floor

and stops.

Not uncertain.

Not delayed.

It has arrived.

There is no body to follow,

no figure to complete the sequence.

The light remains uninterrupted,

doing nothing wrong.

The shadow adjusts itself

to what is already there -

accounting for shape, for distance,

for the exact place

a person is standing.

Nothing enters.

Nothing follows.

The shadow thins, withdraws,

leaving the room as it was,

the light unaltered.

Only then

do I understand

what it took -

and that the measure

was never of the room alone.

GBS jr

Tupper Lake, NY

2011