Architect

She drew the dimensions, but did not set the bounds.
Her rooms were white lines on blue papers:
some days she saw in them lovers, other days, dying men.
She would have liked to have painted them,
a Van Gogh violet for the master bedroom,
Matisse yellow for the kitchen, a trompe l'oeil
in the dining room to disorient the guests.
To the powder room, she would send flocks
of paper nightingales, lavender, silent for now,
but ready to tell all later:   the songs sung
between the satin sheets, the coos that came
with conceptions, the promises that ran,
like a prodigy's black ink, down her walls,
always white-lined on blue paper.

:: Holly Hildebrand, in If I Had a Hammer: Women's Work in Poetry, Fiction, and Photographs