Beasts and Violins

House on Colorado Avenue

58 House on Colorado Avenue If the master one day returns, asking somebody to dust off his hat and restore his coat to the backside of the front door, I would do it. Every breath in this place expands to the walls, then settles on furniture, where the carbon monoxide lapses before being taken in again. All evening I monitor mold where it blackens behind the standup shower stall, and around the border of the vanity lights. These window vestibules work for keeping chill out, but they have made a swamp of the bedroom linens. My chest creaks with my sleep. These one-time servant’s quarters for a destroyed mansion, hauled close to the river, rented month-to-month to shoe sellers, waitresses, an uprooted welder. And now to me, cross-legged on carpet listening to the heater bang on, restringing electric guitars as fast as the work rusts. Me, socked-in by rolls of plastic sheeting sheared into rectangles and taped 59 over glass. The cabin gasps in fits from Christmas storms. Each paned sack of lung rustling to life with wind, while their good gets measured in savings on gas bills. The cord from the hair dryer used to draw the wrapping tight, dangles from the bathroom cupboard, and further up, its shape beckons a suicide from the dim. I’d get outside and plead reprieve from the Chinook, that cold-season -in-a-canyon lord, but the garbage hasn’t been taken in three weeks, and the door won’t shove open for weight of trash bags and snow. ...