I used to go around pressing the walls of my house
with the palms of my hand, inch by inch, and yanking
out all the books one by one, hoping to find the secret
mechanism that would cause the wall to flip around
to a chamber I never knew I had: happy skeletons
surveying chests of jewels, lost canvases of masters.
In the end, the walls were marred by the dirt of my palms,
my books were piled in the center of the room as if
to be burned, and I could see the paint behind the bookshelves
was not as faded as the rest of the paint in my house.
Wondering whether I’d missed the proper spot or sequence,
I was the one in the lost chamber, waiting to be discovered.