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The room, lit dimly with a single string of failing Christmas lights, monochrome white, hums with the dull noise of fans, quietly rustling papers stapled in a small stack chronicling an old lover's new journeys. Behind, spread across the floor, thin manuals overflow their shelves, filled with techniques both obsolete and new that pay the bills, always rustling quietly, plaintively, stacked in disarray, on the left. The long hall lined with the old lover's old paintings leads to the larger room filled with angling books marking out the stacked chronicles of a singular head, a collage of juxtapositions never meant to survive together under one roof. Sandstone, mortared together, irregular, in shapes surpassing count, stand solidly on the foundation, a polygonal focus hollowed out for the fire that radiates, once warmed strongly, long after it fails. In the Not-Spring night, dark towers of trees lit by what light might trickle from the sky, gripping the steep slope down to the stream, spread out their branching as if to dwarf, purposefully, even the most well-intentioned house – sat in its own peculiar geometries. No sound but the hum of fans is heard manufacturing their flow. Tonight the trees must stand on their own, to not be seen, towering as they will. The rippling stream, polishing its smooth stones, will go unlistened. And all the paintings hung in their positions in the long hall, tonight, will remain life-like still.