Sestina for a Flat I Rented

I still have the key to a house with a different door.It was not mine for more than a year.The kitchen tap ran rust before it ran water.I learned that flat by the hour of its light,and the landlord never once said my name,and I did not, that whole winter, expect to stay.

There is a kind of leaving that looks like stay:the coat still hung, the unbolted door,the post arriving in a former name.I have been doing it now for over a year.I do it best in the failing light.I do it the way a stone does water.

You cannot argue with weather, or with water.It takes the shape of whatever will stay.He was the weather. I was the lightleft on for him. That's too neat. The doorwas warped, and swelled shut every yearin August, and he gave the thing a name.

"The sulk," he called it. He gave things a namethe way other men give a garden water:daily, unthinking, and for years.It is the only thing of his I let stay.When August comes and swells the doorI say it out loud, in whatever light.

This is not grief. Grief has a better light.This is the smaller business of a nameoutliving the rooms it opened like a door.I am not asking for him. I am asking for water,for the sound of it, for permission to stayone more paragraph inside that year.

So: here is what I kept of that year.An August. A particular light.A word for a thing that would not stay.A tap that ran the colour of my namebefore it ever ran clear as water.A key that opens somebody else's door.

The year ends. I still say the name.The light goes. I let the water run.I stay on this side of the door.