Look at it and know that you cannot own it.
You can press your fingertips in its paint, footkiss every inch
of its sucker-slick floors, but it will never ever be yours.
It will never make you richer than the derelicts you stepped
over or the years you hocked to get it.
Worship the cover it provides, nothing else.
Do not ogle the oak slab phallusing the frame or the shutter
odalisques splayed against the bricks.
All the beauty you see will shrivel at the slip of a half-flicked
cigarette.
Beware the homely blinds that smother sunsets and
moonrises.
Remember
Walls only hold what is tangible.
Locks do not know in from out.
For every climb up the stair,
there is an equal and opposite
descent.
One day you will see what you’ve bought. Beyond the stain-
soaked glass and the miracle of stories, into the somber
allness of it, the culmination of propertied life,
the contradictory measure of a space too big and too small to breathe in or to fill.
When it happens, step out, shut your eyes, and let the earth cradle your feet.
Rock for a moment in the forces that birthed you. Know that no matter what happens on the inside, this one unvarnished strip of dirt will always be yours.
You’ll know when it’s time to lie in it.
This poem originally appeared in the poetry volume Chisel (2010) by Stacy Torian.
Torian, S. (2010). Chisel. Vandorhall.
Stacy Torian 