Victoria Van Huystee

The smoky grey of four walls 
encase me in the serenity of neutral colors.  

But this grey, a cast like the dust on the mantle, 
is so undefining. It marks a room 
with inexhaustible potential:

the potential to be a bustling expanse, 

a blossoming scrapbook of our snapshot memories

guarded by the twinkle of stars on strings.   

But you will not have it be so. 
The breezes that rustle through linen waves  
so much colder than the sky’s breath 
through the magnolia tree- 

a sage guardian over shiny cars, over the driveways  

that hog the movie outside the windowpanes-  

will chill the dry quietude of this cave.  

“Since I find you will no longer love,” 
it is here- 
here in the buzzing, the noisy hush 
of a residential life, 
laying in the polyester grasses sodden 
with the sweet sugar that still caresses my skin, 
sheathed in the hurried working of melodies through wires-

that the galaxies will gaze down on me,  

and on my expansive cloister of four smoky walls.