The plaster breathes at 3 AM, expanding slow and thin,
a pulse behind the drywall where the house keeps something in,
I pressed my ear against it till the cold came through my jaw,
and heard a repetition I cannot reduce to law.
The carpenter said settling, the landlord said the pipes,
but settling does not scratch in patterns, pipes do not mimic types
of language, syllables arranged in something like a phrase,
repeated through the insulation for a count of days.
What lives in the walls is learning how to speak,
what lives in the walls has been practicing all week,
I covered all the outlets, moved my bed into the hall,
but I can still hear something in the cavity of the wall.
It tapped in rhythm to the television set,
it matched the cadence of my breathing, I cannot forget
the moment that it paused and then resumed a half-beat late,
as if it heard me listening and chose to modulate.
I filled the gaps with caulk and foam, I sealed each tiny crack,
but by the following night the tapping started back,
and now it does not tap, it hums a frequency too low
to place precisely, something that the body comes to know.
The exterminator found nothing living in the space,
no tracks, no evidence of nesting, not a single trace,
he looked at me with patience that was edging into doubt
and wrote a number on a card and let himself back out.
At night I hear it breathing with the rhythm of the heat,
a systole and diastole impossibly concrete,
and when I tune the radio to fill the quiet room
the thing inside the wall begins to hum the selfsame tune.