Beyond the last of wanting, past the corridor of need,
there’s a room he found by accident when wanting stopped to feed
itself on nothing — when the appetite had eaten all it had.
The room at the end of wanting isn’t terrible or sad.
A room is just a room. Four walls. A certain light.
The particular perfume of the lived-in, the been-here-for-a-while.
The man inside has learned to find the room worthwhile.
He used to want the room to open onto something more —
to find a door that led out to the further rooms of meaning and of light.
But the room at the end of wanting is the room that ends the night.
He’s arranged it to his requirements: the comfortable chair,
the lamp with its adjustable commitments to the brightness
the hour needs, the books he sometimes opens —
the patient, quiet tokens of a life madebare.
The building settles in the cold.
The neighbor’s television filters through the fold
of the shared wall. A distant hum of traffic on the street.
These are the sounds the room keeps.
He learned them the way a man learns any place
he’s inhabited long enough to map the space —
the creak at three a.m. when the building shifts its weight,
the pigeons on the window ledge in the morning late.
The wanting used to fill this room with its specific pressure —
the urgent, forward-driving force, the animal of treasure.
It required the room to be more than a room, to be a station
on the way somewhere meaningful. A temporary occupation.
Now the room is the destination. The arriving and the stayed.
The room at the end of wanting where the wanting has been paid
in full with all the years of searching and the searching’s cost —
and the room received him when the wanting got itself lost.
He doesn’t grieve the wanting from inside the room.
To grieve would require wanting the wanting, which would consume
the very quiet the room grants.
The room is only quiet if you stop. If you stop the ants.
The ants of want and urgency and need and the insisting
of the self on its own forward — he stopped resisting,
then stopped wanting to resist, and then the room appeared.
The wanting volunteered to leave him here
with just the lamp and just the chair,
the particular books he doesn’t read and the particular air.
The end is perfectly fine.
The room is his design.
He has a word for it — not peace, not resignation,
not the comfort of the fit.
Just the room. Just the being in the room. Just the staying.
Where the wanting stopped its saying.
The man keeps the room and the room keeps him —
the man provides the occupying, the room provides the placement
of the chair, the lamp, the particular quality of still.
The room at the end of wanting. The room at the end of will.
The will that ended isn’t broken and isn’t lost.
It’s redistributed to the management of cost —
the will to stay, the will to be in the quiet.
The room at the end of wanting, and no riot.