Not Here, by Christina Daub

White Doors, by Vilhelm Hammershoi (Denmark). 1905.

Not Here
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Open rooms, open doors, doors
I walk through but do not find you.

Doors opening into openness,
the old/new space of I, not us.

And where is the window God
opens after shutting a door,

a window to the blue door of a sky
so wide no one can latch

or unlock it. The door to my heart
is also blue, a door opened

and stained blue before blue
was blue when it was only sky

and a door the dead walk through
if we give them a knob. So take

this knob, my knob, which unlike
yours still throbs, shutting, shutting,

shutting it's small blue door
against this house, this labyrinth

of mute and open rooms.

Christina Daub

This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic I See a Darkness challenge.
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Christina Daub co-founded The Plum Review, a national award winning poetry journal, started The Plum Writers Retreats and The Plum Reading Series which featured Joseph Brodsky, Carolyn Forché, Mark Strand and many others. Recent poems appear in the anthologies Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC, edited by Kim Roberts, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and The Paradelle, both edited by Billy Collins. She is a recipient of a Young American Poet's award and her work has been translated into Russian, Italian and German. She has taught Poetry and Creative Writing in the English Department at George Washington University and in both the Maryland and Virginia Poets-in-the-Schools programs as well as to adults for many years at The Writer's Center. She has forthcoming work in Beltway Poetry Quarterly and The Southampton Review.