Drawing The Doorway Last

I.
From the scent of rain on old wood
and the hush before a storm,
a whole season gathers itself
in the hollow of the writer’s chest.
A single stone, warmed by sun,
is placed at the threshold
of the first line of his words,
to keep the wind from closing it.

II.
A (her?) shadow leans across the windowpane
as dust rises like a grey sparkling mist
from the floorboards.
A cup of misting coffee
holds the wavering reflection
of a life letting go,
a soul turning to a ghost;
unbequeathed.

III.
In the quiet chambers of the man’s memory,
the body becomes a map
with ridges of regret,
of valleys carved by choices,
and a river that never found its sea.
Somewhere in these middle stanzas
of life and love, a lantern flickers
as if someone has just entered his mood.

IV.
His arms rest on the stoic table.
A voice inside him mumbles something,
but the heart-sigh is everything.
He has learned that longing
is not a wound, but an evening ocean.
How it returns, it recedes,
it leaves the air changed.
(He sips his coffee,
watches the morning light,
and imagines her brushing her hair
in the house he’s built from dreams.)
Those dreams that huddle
at the foot of the bed,
unruly, ungoverned.
He steps around them carefully
as if they might riot.
As desire, that old red flame,
flirts with the edges of the page
but does not consume it.
Its tongue now slit by a papercut;
a hint of blood makes his words hungry.

VI.
In the sixth verse,
heat rises between memory and skin.
He walks through the tall tales
of a life half‑remembered
and half‑invented.
Each sentence a whisper
of what might have been
if time had catered to him
a bit differently.
Her name,
the one he never spoke aloud
drifts like smoke
through the seventh verse.
He reaches for it,
but it slips between his fingers
like rain trickling through branches,
unable to be oralized.

VIII.
All night he circles the room,
a slow orbit around the past
and a could-be comet of a future.
His thumb grazes the wick of a candle
that refuses to stay lit,
because this night is erratic.
He wonders why the river inside him
smiles for everyone else
but weeps through his own hands.
A serpent of doubt rattles its tail
and he wishes it would bite already.

IX.
He wakes to the cool touch of morning, as
nine candles burn in nine mirrors,
each one reflecting a different version
of the man he has been.
A woman steps out of the dawn
-not her, not exactly
but the idea of her,
the echo of her voice
carries across the mental distance.
She offers him a single feather
that turns to light in his palm.
It rises, becomes sky,
becomes a path,
becomes the soft truth
that some encounters
live only in the space between lines.

The sun wears yellow armor
to ward off the lasting night of daggers
that couldn’t be stars.
As the day begins like they all do;
he props the door open
with that first stone, still not thrown away.

~~~