The Year in Review Through Prose Poetry

Ode to Breezehome (Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim)

There is a home in my heart, and I call it Breezehome. There is a hearth that draws me back to its familiar flame, stew pot blackening over still warm coals, and I call it Breezehome. Above the molten pit, ashen and smoldering, a rack of fish hang drying, their scales slowly shriveling, curling at the edges, singed. While this house’s shell is like a tortoise’s, marbled with grime, bracken and cracked, it’s interior is as soft as the meat beneath the shell, as moist, as precious, and as appetizing. There is a place for me inside a giant tortoise shell, and I call it Breezehome.

Breezehome with its large feathered bed, the mites that crawl between the sheets, the bearskin that stretches over the mattress, ferocious even in death, ferocious as Breezehome herself. There is a candle that burns for me on my nightstand in Breezehome, the flickering drop of flame like a single tear from the sun, wispy and fickle. There is a chest of treasures that holds as much as the human heart, and it opens only in Breezehome. Along the walls, among the dust of bookshelves, and cast about the hardwood floors and elk-hide carpets, a library of books, tomes, and scrolls, the knowledge of the world inked onto so much brittle parchment. There is a place where wisdom collects like rainwater below a storm drain, and I call it Breezehome. Breezehome, where the body can rest and the spirit find respite.