Fall 2011 - The University of Scranton

the room so he can gather everything from the view. And once again, by
gazing, the light falls westward as the night takes over. Yet the figure always
anticipates the hanging moon. Desirously he hopes it will hold with a
glow from the heavens on this particular evening. So he waits, in prayer,
squatted and bent upon the wooden chair, with the door still locked in fear
of reprisal. Unbeknownst to him, however, the other tenants move along
through their lives, climbing the stairs in the outside hallways and reaching
their own rooms. They go in and out, up the stairs and down, through the
door and out the cobblestone lane off always to somewhere, some other
place.
The man in the room had been there before but felt his feet
missing meeting all the other feet that flapped the ground and marked
certain positions; he prefers to rest his own at will.
They now grip the shaded tile floor and from time to time he
imagines himself as a firm tree trunk which gives itself to its embedded
roots. So he clutches his legs for a long while and his muscles tighten
uniquely. His temple clenches and he vanishes while his eyes close. Like
the half-hooked moon that hangs from its fellow atmosphere, this figure
renews his various formulations this way and that, as daily he swells a smile
or loops a lip or lifts his head, being so that he can only be seen from the
window in always a different gesture. Our man from behind pleasures
himself in all the faces that he can rearrange to the passing strangers, but
does anyone see his spine? No, only the keyhole can. He sets himself up
that way.
Nearby, along the white plastered wall, sits the bed. It lies alone
for the day and is retreated to only during the night. He goes there now.
That then is when the door is locked and so also the window lets no more
wind in. The drapes enclose the room. Then being he can make faces
for nobody but his blackened mind, enclosed in its own kind of white
walls. So the man behind the locked door weeps and wrangles within his
covers, twisting this way and that until his placid mind falls upon some
disassociated reminiscence recalling the child’s movements: whimsically, he
dreams in colors.
It takes a long time for him to wake himself. He arises from his
cornered bed and stands naked to himself alone, the newborn sun peeking
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