Lord, When Tomorrow Falls upon the House

In a dream, tomorrow summons the speaker to a courtroom beneath his bed, down a staircase made of the lifetimes of the people he loves, where the judge is an enormous clock with scissors for hands and the file before it is titled “The Things You Thought Would Stay”. An architect by trade, he knows where to place a column and how to calculate the loads on a roof, yet here he cannot shore up a mother who waits or know the weight of the words “He did not return”. Between the scenes the text turns to prayer, asking to be spared an upheaval that begins with a ringing phone and to keep the faces that make returning possible. When a clerk asks him to sign that he is ready, he answers that nobody becomes ready for this; then the scent of bread drifts down through a crack in the ceiling, he hears a familiar cough and water moving in the kitchen, and he sees that he has been spending his loved ones' presence rehearsing their absence. He wakes before the verdict, finds them asleep and the house whole, says the words he had been postponing, and folds the paper he was asked to sign into a little boat for a child to sail in a glass of water.