Turn the key: note how the emptiness accumulates
as you come in; how by being here at all you seem to add to it,
until it fills the corridor with that fermented stasis
you both disturb and add to as you move. Pass
through a second door, a portal of stirred air,
ignore the rooms to left and right and take the stairs,
your shoes dislodging dust that billows
up in tiny detonations. You’re walking underwater,
the silt explodes beneath your feet; at first you think you’ll drown
but what’s flashing through your mind in one
slow-motion scattering of greys is not your own life but theirs.
No matter that you still can’t breathe – that’s how it’s always
been in here: even the nothingness is thick as blotting paper
on which their shapes have spread like ink – must, damp,
the outline of a body sketched in mothballs and almost-
memory. The furniture is ghostly beneath the sheets
but the missing pictures are still there, outlined
in frames of dirt on squares of wall now white as bone
surprised beneath the skin. You were in every one of them.
Now you’re the last flame in the grate:
Hamlet in his theatre of shadows, their embers at your feet.