Paul Meier reading
Confined
by Alan Harris
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Nothing but a precise second hand is moving within the solitary stillness of this house. I convalesce and convalesce while reading the daily wallpaper. Knickknacks cling tightly to their positions, dumbly flaunting their faded novelty close to books of past power that slump on their shelves like half-fallen dominoes. Fatigued by the familiar and glued down by gravity, I lie back, later sit up, then move about, then sit again, a restless captive of fever and furnishings. Every other person in the world just now is elsewhere and occupied. Have I secretly died? "Snap," replies the house, settling. I lie back down close to my accurate quartz-driven clock whose second hand counts out sixty clockwise clicks and on and on until the wallpaper blurs and nothing occurs. |
From the book Writing All Over the World's Wall (1995)
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