Issue 8: Zoe Skoulding
THE ROOMS
Room 204
When entering the room you’ve already
crossed it in an arc completing itself
without your knowledge
Footsteps tick digital
this foot
that foot with no memory
while the mind sweeps analog through sound waves
bouncing off four walls
This was the phrase you
remember
each note altering the last
this was its cadence falling from major
to minor
willow over water where birds
chant in broken rivers
It seems that you’re
addicted to this music however
hard you try not to listen to it
The bird sings with its fingers
Twice
The bird
sings with its fingers
Twice
I repeat
Room 201
When entering the room he’s listening
for the two silences
the one inside
and the one outside the window
still
air settled over plumbing and the vague
hush of wind or traffic the way they
fight each other in his ear
If there’s a
third silence in the high-toned hum
of blood he’s paying no attention
Every
cell sings yesterday
the slow drowse
of numbers multiplying secretly
at his fingertips
every different room
the same and every sameness changed
where sleep undoes the hook
unlocks
the eye that opens in the wall between us
Room 207
When entering the room you hesitate
you
mustn’t look back but you look back
which means
you’ll be dismembered in the old story
or turned to salt
Parts of you are folded
in panels of light that cut across the
bottle on the table
Starting again
and again
reassembles the sequence
Repeat
We drink from elliptical rims
while the sun that sinks behind the window
illuminates a note folded in two
All of these things are still happening in
the room
which is a page torn from a
notebook
no longer addressing itself
to anyone in particular
Room 35
When entering the room you walk over
to the window
but the light’s not coming
through
it falls against brick and blocked exits
this is where nothing holds up
Now you find
you are lost in a basement where there’s no
exchange only repetition
hands caught
in waves of a body’s falling phrases
where we descend
mid-way through this life a
tangled wood
white skin etched against grey
Look
at death always in a hurry
Try to
move slowly now
say this in a language
you only partly understand
Begin
the beautiful sentence you have chosen
without seeing how it will ever
Room 4036
When entering the room bathed in data
streams I flick a switch as glittering squares
cascade down the window from far above
the flyover
where shapes of workers move
in offices of light and figures glide
over screens in rapid unreadable
patterns
You enter the room in pixels
now you’re breaking up
there’s nothing more to
say you are leaving but I don’t know how
to leave this room
whose walls have suddenly
expanded
I roam endlessly over
the chemical scent of new carpet that’s
drawing me to the exact location
of what I remember not happening
Room 131
When entering the room you’re holding a
key in your hand
a number in your head
that will be gone tomorrow
Already
it’s too late for the pattern unfolding
through the edges of a music that was
thought
it was the way we thought
the dripping
tap
rain falling
a rhythm we never
asked for but fell into
never missing
a
What was the number of yesterday’s
room
This is yesterday’s key and today’s
is somewhere at the end of a pocket
that opens unfathomably
as if
I could reach even the silence clanging
between hangers in the empty wardrobe
Zoë Skoulding's recent poetry collections include Remains of a Future City (Seren, 2008). She is a lecturer in creative writing at Bangor University and editor of the international poetry quarterly, Poetry Wales.
