The Geography of Static

The dial catches on wallpaper.

Pears, yellow as old varnish,
continue ripening inside a house
that no longer remembers its own address.

Someone hums beneath the cabinets,
along with wood that already knows the tune.

Rain arrives before the clouds.

Shoes darken beside a door
that has spent twenty years opening
for the wrong people.

Water rehearses the stains it will leave
As the years continue to pass.

Christmas lights, and hospital bleach.

A paper star caught
inside cold fluorescent lights.

A heart monitor borrowing its cadence
from the crinkle of wrapping paper.

Somewhere, a child tears open December.
And somewhere else, a nurse closes the curtain.

Every frequency tastes like that blue enamel cup.

The one that waits beside three different sinks,
its handle remembering all too well
the thumb that chipped it.

All while the hand itself never grows older.

The wallpaper pears.

Lemon disinfectant, rain, and the bitter smell of pennies.
The hallway where pencil marks keep climbing the wall
decades after the children have stopped.

Static gathers in lampshades and coat pockets,
clotting inside the folded corners of recipes.

It settles between photographs until every face
belongs to absolutely everyone.

I turn the dial to the left, and somebody laughs
just before discovering what grief weighs.
Somebody coughs in a room that hasn't yet been built.

Outside, snow continues falling through another August.

The signal stabilizes. Briefly.

For one impossible breath
the pears, the rain, the hospital,
the blue cup, and the humming,

all occupy the same afternoon.

Then, only static again.
The soft insistence of places
still saying my name to themselves.