Page 118 of Wayfarers

Sylvie The House on the Rock

I want access. I want a peephole

into Knox’s brain, want to see

what he sees, because I know it’s so different

even when we’re standing side by side.

Think of all the lenses that curve

and shape the way we know the world:

the religion lens, the money lens, the stability

or lack-thereof lens that shapes the way we see

that gas station, that golden retriever,

that hesitation in his eyes before I toss him

a line and hope to connect. Even our no-dad lenses

mismatch. No one experience can be mapped

onto another, we’re all so different even if

we’re the same, and it would make me give up

on the whole human project if it wasn’t the reason

I love it. The mystery. The almost. Alex Jordan

spent his years collecting things and every single one of them

is like eight feet tall. The House on the Rock

isn’t just his house, it’s a series of houses, it’s a maze

of catwalks that take you up through the life-

size ceramic angels with their unseeing eyes

bathed red by some flickering light and when

Knox looks at me and asks is this hell

I tell him he hasn’t even seen the self-playing

piano room yet. Fortune-telling machines

waggling their mustaches, slow-blinking dolls

with human hair and frilly little dresses,

marionettes, a dozen soldiers with cymbals

and they clap them together when we pass