You know something I don’t know

I can hear you tapping softly outside the guest room door, in the hall, measured, hoisting the sun into position beyond the green lake and gray misty scrub. When you chime the mourning doves shiver and sigh at your calling. Barefoot, I walk across the still-dark carpeted floor of the room and lay my ear over the door. You know something I don’t know, so much of this house that you built is still dark. My feet try to know as much as they can, the too-clean carpet, linoleum, wood, red dust, sticker burrs, the acid kisses of fire-ants, thick grass of spring, the soft muck of the lakeshore, the peeling paint and baked wood of the dock. Like everything else, in time this place will be for sale. You’ve made sure you can pay for a funeral that never seems to arrive. Everything must go. What will you do with all this? Should I get rid of these memories? Where will you put my ashes? You know something I don’t know. The sun rises in this direction, or is it that we rush towards it? If I unlocked its chest I could not hold it, I would slip away into its monstrous light. Slip away if I were to try to carry it from the root cellar to the lake. That sightless space, were it to become day, would turn from something unknowable into something meaningless- the beating of a deep mass of daddy-longlegs bodies against concrete. A soft tapping of a heart outside of the guest room door. A tiny soft foot learning to be pierced and stung.