Title: The Apartment

Author: PANSY DUNCAN

In: Sport 31: Spring 2003

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, November 2003

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Verse Literature

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Sport 31: Spring 2003

The Apartment

page 138

The Apartment

I
Even the light's
migrated to wake up

beside you in this new,
white room—

trees erased
to accommodate

the sounds that travel the morning's long
conversation

with distance, a white wall surfacing
in rented glass.

There's nothing left to do
but wait, now,

for something to remind us
why we came.

II
Rooms
where every word we ever spoke

has gathered, now, around us,
to ask after

the things that didn't quite make it
up the stairs—missing boxes

containing the gestures
we didn't want to make

boxes whose weight is all
that holds us to the ground.

page 139

And the shadows
we brought with us

fall near enough now
to the things that cast them

to demonstrate
that light still travels here in lines.

More than one dish has broken
already to baptise

each new room—

broken glass lodging itself
inside the body.

Think—
we're high enough here

for water
to try its scales in the pipes,

for clouds
to enter by the bathroom window

a voice
dropped from the roof

to take its question
with it into disappearance—

for us to wrap the wind
around our bodies

to keep us warm at night.