Because in medieval Italian it meant “room”
I tied the curtains at their elbows with
what could have been honor cords or worse
yet, a belt from the 60s, so hideous were the
tassels that were dancing a little tarantella
after I had propped the windows and the wind
had carried in the song the rubbing trees
were making, without any accompaniment,
mind you, from a tambourine, although the bells
of the occasional sleigh played that part,
while I waited for the vixen and their shameless
yelping to follow the music and the cold
and the night inside where I sat half man,
half snow, to investigate my squeaking
pencil and the flapping of the bird-white page
I couldn’ t seem to catch in those years when I
lugged around a frozen heart and was infatuated
with whiteness, since I had read somewhere it was
the absence of color, which could not be true
since I had once loved a pure white duck with
a white bill and feet and I had even torn its white
flesh with my teeth that were still then white,
which should have been all the proof anyone needed
to debunk our outdated theories of absence.