Most love poems ask to be near someone. Eli Wallis asks for something stranger: to move into a piece of music, with the loved one beside the speaker. Judging by the title, which reads like a jazz track listing with a place name attached, the poem is a response to a piece of music heard in a particular spot. The poem never explains this. It simply treats the song as a building, with paths, corners, leaks and a bathroom, and the speaker wants to settle there. The central idea is that listening can become a way of dwelling, and that intimacy with another person has a floor plan.
The house the speaker imagines is not grand. It is shabby and lived-in: instant coffee, ghosts "in the corners," leaks "on rainy days." The most interesting line is "Paint your instant coffee and / drink your tear-down walls." The verbs are scrambled, so you paint a drink and drink a wall, which feels like how music mixes the senses. The phrase "tear-down walls" works two ways. It could be a rundown house waiting for the wrecking ball, or defences coming down between two people. Either way, the speaker finds the decay appealing.
Wallis builds the middle of the poem around a chain: "watching the / cat watch the rain watch the way / you move so quietly." Each watcher is nested inside another, so attention passes down the line until it lands on the beloved. Then comes the poem's most musical moment: "a / toe broken in a slipper / note broken on the lip a / squeak." With no punctuation, body and instrument blur. The toe and the note, the slipper and the lip, sit in the same grammatical slot. The "squeak" is "so charged so telling" because the speaker is paying attention at the scale of tiny sounds, where a house, or a song, reveals itself.
The form copies this drifting attention. The lines are short and fairly even, and nothing rhymes. Instead the sentences spill over the line endings, often at awkward points: "over / grown," "Find the / ghosts," "a / squeak." Splitting "overgrown" across two lines makes you slow down and pick your way along, which suits the "loping paths." Punctuation is sparse, so phrases run together and you often can't tell where one thought ends. That uncertainty feels like improvised music, where a phrase starts before the last one has finished. Repetition holds it together: "I want to live inside" returns, "this song" keeps coming back, and so does the claw-foot tub.
The tub is where the poem turns playful. It is "comically big really," and the beloved's joke, that it was made "for the giants who used to live / inside this song," lets another person's voice into the poem. The speaker's longing is not solemn. The giants also stretch the scale, so the song feels huge and old, with a history before the couple arrived. Then the poem shrinks everything to one eye: "the tidepool of / your eye the way it quavers / like the lightbeams on the pearl / of a giant claw-foot tub." "Quavers" is the key word here, since it means to tremble and is also a musical term. Seeing and hearing merge once more. The enamel of the tub becomes a pearl, and the tub, the eye and the song are all folded into one image.
The ending loops back to the start. "Dusk-lit moss" in the opening becomes "the twilight of this song," so the poem finishes in the same light it began in. Twilight also suggests the music, and maybe the moment, is nearly over. The speaker's verbs are mostly "want," never "do," and that gives the poem its ache. This is a wish to stay inside something that will end.
The poem is worth studying because it shows how a poem can answer music without describing it. Wallis doesn't tell us what the song sounds like. Instead the poem borrows the song's behaviour: its looseness, its small noises, its way of making a space you can step into. It also shows that tenderness doesn't need grand language. A chipped, leaky, ghost-filled house and a ridiculous bathtub are enough to say what the speaker means by closeness.