THE HOUSE OF THE SUN

In The House of the Sun,
The light is so bright

The eye never opens wide.
Everything here is bleached by the light;
There is no color but gold.

The air is gold. The air is solid.

Everywhere you look,
The face of the immobile saint.
Not table or chair,

No plate or plank of wood without its halo.
There are no shadows int The House of the Sun

Because the house moves as the sun moves
And is always just beneath it.
It is always noon in The House of the Sun.

The people in The House of the Sun
Are dry and withered and brown and light
And a gust of air could blow them off.

There is not any air.

They move through the rooms of The House of the Sun
As dry leaves move among dry trees
In a country of drought.

There are mirrors lying on tables in The House of the Sun.
The people in The House of the Sun
Do not look at themselves,

Their dry hands, their cheeks, dry leaf-skin.
They are pictures in the mirrors
In The House of the Sun,

Dry riverbeds,
Hot glass, shattered with cracks,
Mountain peaks around whose base

The hot wind blows,
The thin, hot beasts circling a steaming gold pool.

The people in The House of the Sun
Do not look into them.
No one is thirsty in The House of the Sun.

They have forgotten thirst.
There is no anger in The House of the Sun.
They have been pressed flat,

As by a hard rock.

In The House of the Sun,
There is nothing to see.

In the windows of The House of the Sun
The blinding light hangs like a drapery
Between them and their lives.

The people in The House of the Sun
Walk with their eyes cast down.
Their eyes are lidded,

Like a cat's or a snake's
They walk with their eyes cast down

As if something terribly embarrassing had happened.