by Wendy Barry
From the busy street, full of tourists
and their hosts, students and shoppers,
I open the door and step into the hallway
with the exposed brick painted pale yellow.
Cooler than the street, almost subterranean,
narrow and long, in a building erected
over a century ago, it digs
back to the beginning.
My shoes clack along on the hard floor
with an echo. Built and rebuilt and renovated
and restored after earthquake and civil war,
the building is a public secret.
Straight ahead through the window
at the end, I see an inaccessible garden,
but I am not trying to go there right now.
I turn to the stairs, the walls in the stair well
baby-blue and white; the stairs are carpeted,
unlike the hall, and the clacking stops,
and the sound is replaced by the laboring
of my breath as I climb.
On the second floor, there is a door
to the offices, and a coded lock
I always get wrong first, but then right
the second time. In your office, the furniture
is blue and gray and the light comes from a
window high up on the wall behind me.
When I walk in, I can see the rooftops.
and brick walls shooting up around us in
a cacophony of architecture
from inside the growing, sinking city.
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