Willingly

When I get up he has been long at work, his brush limber against the house. Seeing him on his ladder under the eaves, I look back on myself asleep in the dream I could not carry awake. Sleep inside a house that is being painted, whole lifetimes now only the familiar cast of morning light over the prayer plant. This “not remembering” is something new of where you have been. What was settled or unsettled in sleep stays there. But your house under this steady arm is leaving itself and you see this gradual surface of new light covering your sleep has the greater power. You think now you felt brush strokes or the space between them, a motion bearing down on you—accumulation of stars, each night of them arranging over the roofs of entire cities. His careful strokes whiten the web, the swirl of woodgrain blotted out like a breath stopped at the heart. Nothing has changed you say, faithlessly. But something has cleansed you past recognition. When you stand near his ladder looking up he does not acknowledge you, and as from daylight in a dream you see your house has passed from you into the blessed hands of others. This is ownership, you think, arriving in the heady afterlife of paint smell. A deep opening goes on in you. Some paint has dropped onto your shoulder as though light concealed an unsuspected weight. You think it has fallen through you. You think you have agreed to this, what has been done with your life, willingly.