If I tell you about our house,
tell you so well that you can imagine yourself living in it, it will no
longer be my house.
It will be yours, and I
will be nothing but its former resident,
just as the person who lived in your actual house
before you is not even a thought for you.
You will imagine me
in rooms that belong to you,
eating out of your refrigerator, sleeping in your bed,
and in this way I too will become yours.
But if I keep the details of this house
to myself, leave it as a bare
sketch of a house, perhaps even make it an impossible house,
a house that couldn’t stand,
a house you couldn’t reconstruct
from my description, a house whose rooms shift and twist
and move and even vanish and reappear - then you
will be living in my house,
the house as I actually remember it,
a house you could never make your own.
Then you will have to trust me, and in
order to trust me you
will have to believe in me.
I will stand on my own.
An Impossible Weld by George Weld, extracted from 'ciprian honey cathedral' by Raymond Meeks, published September 2020
