“A free-verse 30 line poem, unrhymed, in the style of John Ashbury's early poems in "The Double Dream Of Spring”

In a glass hallway somewhere between morning  
And the half-remembered nap of four o’clock,  
The chairs line themselves in conspiracy—  
Bent legs, sometimes bracing, sometimes conceding  
The weight of those who do not pause to sit.  
Light, particulate and insistent, enters  
From all sides, scattering motives on the floor—  
Mosaic of moments, a tilt in one direction  
No larger than the bias of a leaf descending  
Natural, yet absolute, as a dropped card.

Someone’s laughter from another wing, muffled,  
A part of the story already diffused  
By the passivity of walls and the corridor’s curve,  
Arranges itself between the ceiling tiles  
Like dust collecting mapless histories of movement—  
Shoes, echoes, the click and answer of passing.  
Here, time composes errands inside the margins  
And erases them, even as they are found.  
A memory waits at every intersection,  
Pausing to wonder why it has surfaced now—  
A key left on a desk, a fragment of music  
Unsure to whom it belongs.

It is possible to become absorbed  
By the minor gestures: A shadow glancing the wainscot,  
The softened abrasion of a newspaper folded  
Again and again until it yields, almost willingly,  
To the logic of hands with nowhere to go.  
Outside, a tree is learning the language  
Of wind, discovers itself in reflection  
Stretched over the glass—wavering, then deciding.  
The day follows its private conversations,  
Each syllable closing a door, or opening  
A corridor with more windows than you remember.

And here, ultimately, is the room refusing conclusion—  
A vase perched where someone left it this morning,  
Bright, but not insistent, so at ease with its ask.  
No arrangement of flowers, just the possibility  
Of water, absorbing light as a private act.  
We are left with the hum  
Of air conditioning, and the knowledge  
That somewhere else the story continues,  
Uncaptioned, graceful, assembling its meaning  
From the shifting grammar of passage.

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