Millennium Nights

You are sitting where I keep not looking — the part of the room I leave out when I describe it. The window is glass when the streetlight holds and mirror when it shifts, and right now it is both — your face where my reflection belongs. You hear the room. You stay past the hour — past the sound a quiet makes when quiet is the only one still listening. You see what I look like from the far side of the glass. The pane between us is the width of a word I am not saying. You hear it anyway. You are not leaving. You are not looking away. You do not shift your weight. You do not check the hour. Your shoulders lower by a fraction only I would see because I have not looked away. You sit in the seat nobody chooses — you are sitting in it right now. You feel the draft, its exact direction. You hear what I sound like when I think the room is empty. And the window is forgetting how to be a wall. There is nothing underneath this. No second meaning. I am looking at you and meaning exactly that. The glass thins to only glass — I see through it completely, and you are still here. I lean close and breathe against the pane. The fog takes your face. It clears. You are still here. You are here. You hear the room, the hour, the sound I make when I stop performing it. This is the window. This is the night — this is the last song I mean exactly the way I...