Even in This Light

No one arises, no one wakes up.  He misses the hotel.  Room service.  The wrought-iron filigree on the balustrade.  Women in aprons. 

The house is old, cold and damp.  Not his house; he doesn’t have one.  He is visiting people blissfully asleep in their rented Victorian, unconscious of the elevated needs of guests.  He walks one way across his room and one way back.  The floor dips in the middle and creaks down to its nails.  He remembers the server in the hotel café.  Her black skirt, her white blouse, the intimate blooms of perspiration.  Her flushed face. 

Someone will get up soon, he thinks, and squeaks open his door to probe the hallway. 

The living room exhales a hundred years of renters at him: loggers, bootleggers, dopers, drinkers, students; yellowing welfare men, women with trucker lovers.  "Daybreak" by Maxfield Parrish hangs on the cold green wall, holding on against the steadily layering smoke. 

Even in this light it hypnotizes.  How many lodgers would have noticed?  Been suspended in it?  Might molder yet within its light-touched leaves?   Stilled lives irradiate curved blue and soft, impossible glows.  Among the columns some slight being bends to kiss them all awake.  He remembers the server’s knees.