This vacant hour before sleep

in the eastern bedroom

- where, any day now,

sensitive plants from the garden will move in

with me in my nocturnal habitat,

for fall & winter -

I float loosely suspended on my back

in David Hinton's desert poetry

& Gary Snyder's practical,

down-to-earth, up-to-sky prose poems

Autumn has already shortened the northern days

considerably;

no need, anymore,

to pull the window curtains shut at night,

but rather let the dark seep in freely

with its morpheuology;

sharp grains of stars glued to the ceiling

and the retina;

the slow, calm breath of the swell from conception

raising my chest again & again,

as life plays out in & around me,

the kittens Cesi & Silver

playing with a paper bag outside the door;

the analogue radio by the bed turned off;

beyond its offness talking

about the Trump – Harris debate

due in a couple of hours

This eastern bedroom on the upper floor,

tripple-glazedly windowed out towards a lawn

- with some old bird cherry trees

and a number of black current and gooseberry bushes;

the horses' meadows further out,

with a group of teenage birches saved by me

for a growing grove -

has me imagine that I'm in a Buddhist settlement

in Dharamsala; a Westerner with an Eastern mind

The hours in this room are silent rest stops;

gravity & my muscles on speaking terms,

my years giving off a scent of apples

in porcelain bowls

in the dead of a spacious night's evacuated dayroom;

the natural order of things dispersing me

around the perimeter of the present,

practicing its future role as a distant past,

as an emergent thought ends me up

in a very small room in a very small house

by a country road on the island of Visingsö

in Lake Vättern in Sweden in fall & winter 1969 – 70,

when I studied there, twenty years old,

and managed to be allotted the little house

with its little room, a kilometer away

from the crammed & crowded noise

of the regular student facilities

Yes, in each room there are other rooms,

which I believe Gaston Bachelard

as well as Juhani Pallasmaa

and other philosophers of secluded spaces

would vouch for

This here simple upstairs eastern room, without identity,

except the imagined one reeking off of me,

also places me back into the waiting room

at a counsellor's,

where I was opened and saved in 2004,

in the wake of a redheaded lover from the mountains's

departure for New Zealand with her climbing equipment,

for an arborist position

This room reflects me

like a good psychotherapist,

having me call the shots

without even noticing

This room is exactly where I've gotten;

precisely where I am;

a cube up in the air,

its six sides an inclusive enclosure,

open to any thoughts,

and even no thoughts;

a place of scarcity

and the space between words,

between lives, even;

one of Dylan Thomas's ”stations of the breath”