after Robert Schumann, Kinderszenen, Op. 15

Or was it a gust of wind? I had been walking
as I always walked, along that hallway, a place
I’d passed each day for years and never noticed,
thinking about summer, thinking
about sunlight, the anonymity of love: and then
you touched me – did you touch me? –
and the door I‘d never seen swung back, flew open
and the wind that swept its hand across my face
passed by.
                      And on the other side – the plain wood
of that casing, the simple latch – not
an attic, not a cloakroom, but
a castle: oak and glass and polished stone.
It was caverned, glistening, windows
with the loft of mountain air and floors
like northern lakes at twilight: I stepped in, didn’t think
to see if you had followed, silence
pulling, shimmering, down corridors, through
walls. But when at last I turned and called, the echo
told me.
                Like the moonlight
drifting in those never-furnished rooms.