Exhaust

Not under the sky,
stood in the room
leaning with one
hand upon the sleeping
white stucco wall.

Don't lean there,
said. Too hard and you could wake it up
could shake the windows from the walls
could shake the doors to the ground
could shake the paint off
until, we stepping gently
over them over their
angles arrive

at the very edges of the white;
push them back. In those horizonless stretches
where our memory's necks strain
failed oxygen machines
less rosy now the thought progresses
sit silently gasping

It is good,
good that we leave them as they are
good that we
sit upright in rows imagining,
oxygen chimneys
for some unknown industry
in a room of four-paned clouds
hung squarely on the north wall.