Elegy for a Borrowed Room

I lived in that room for two years.

I left nothing behind.

I left everything behind.

The window faced east.

I learned the light of every season

through that window —

the thin winter light,

the extravagant summer light,

the particular gold of October

that made everything look

like it was being remembered.

I was happy there, sometimes.

I was unhappy there, sometimes.

I was mostly just alive there,

which is the ordinary condition

and the one we forget to be grateful for.

The room did not know me.

Rooms do not know us.

But I knew the room —

every creak of the floor,

every draft from the old window,

the way the radiator knocked

at two in the morning

like something trying to get in.

I have lived in many borrowed rooms.

I have left them all.

They have not left me.

This is an elegy for a room

that does not know it is being mourned.

This is an elegy for all the rooms

I have loved and left

and cannot go back to.

The window still faces east.

The light still comes in the morning.

Someone else is learning it now.