I.

Be as an empty house. Send your guests away

and let the halls go dim. Block out your children.

Lower the blinds. Let the muted gray

settle into the shape your quiet has taken.

Assign each pain its room—unfurnished, plain—

a presence you know by outline alone.

Enter when you must. Leave when you regain

the small composure absence makes its own.

The ascetic is a vessel, narrow and exact,

a conduit pared to what he will endure.

He divines the little he can of the house intact

and lets the unsolved chambers remain obscure.

There is no time for solace or display.

Only the discipline of turning things away.

II.

The romance of leaving. The romance of staying.

Two bodies in the same unlit corridor,

each testing the frame, each quietly weighing

what is kept, what loosens, what presses for more.

You built the inner rooms again—unadorned,

its thresholds cleared, the echoes unbidden.

You crossed it lightly, believing you had mourned

what needed release, your solitude thinned

to something almost bearable. Yet she arrived

without design, and took a room untouched—

a chamber neither grief nor will supplied,

though both had held the others just enough.

Whatever emptiness promised to allay,

she is the one you must never turn away.