Sleeping in its brick tabernacle

the still water is like an ear or radar dish

attuned to distant pulse. Incurious,

we’ve walked forever to school and work

past locked gates. The saw tooth roof

gives nothing away but scission with sky

and though the key-hole draws the eye, the pupil

contracts. Inside, a herringbone of oak beams

and rafters hovers over the water’s weight

and repose. Beyond the inscrutable iron fence

the street’s steep uphill/ downhill zeal;

urban windows; the domestic race

of breakfast, phones and life and birth and death.

Inside this null and void this leave no trace

the morning sun has picked the lock,

entering through a gable’s little porthole,

bending light with its oblique know-how.