Laure-Anne Bosselaar: There was a Room in Antwerp

There was a room in Antwerp I loved so much 
    I never filled it with books, a bed, or a table. 
       It was alive with its own clarity — & I feared 
anything left there would etch shadows in that radiance.                            
 
The room was in the attic of a hundred-year-old house. 
            Hunched under a mansard roof, all its windows 
faced the sky. No horizon, no walls, no other windows 
                        stared into mine. 
 
The wide-planked floor had been painted over for more 
     than a century. Scratches in the floor revealed other     
             colors under its white surface. A deep scuff 
showed a reddish gray, other scratches yellow, green, 
      or black. 
 
                 The sun splashed into that room at noon:
cascades of light. Dust, sucked upward by the heat, 
       fluttered under the skylight’s chicken-wire glass. 
I’d stretch out my palms to the rays then, 
 
       & grab that light, lie on my back & listen — 
through the layers of whirling air — to the city’s 
       guttural chatter, 
the clang of tramways, & melancholic calls of tall ships 
        with their crowns of shrieking gulls. 
            
        I owned that light — alive in my hands.

“There was a Room in Antwerp” from These Many Rooms copyright 2019 by Laure-Anne Bosselaar appears here with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.