We do not know who speaks to us. Or should I write: ‘I do not know who speaks to me’? For that pronoun (ðe) seems singular, unless the second person had already begun the collapse of its distinction between number by the time of this utterance. (Unlikely. When was this utterance? Patience. One problem at a time.) I am sitting in my study staring at a digital image of a sentence which was inked onto the skin of a dead animal hundreds of years ago. Four words inside my four walls. It is dark. At this time of year the days close in quickly in Fife. The voice that addresses me is disembodied. If I practise patience, will it reveal itself? ‘I’ am an indirect object. Of the verb, but also of this verse. (I believe these words a poem, but I cannot yet explain to you why.) Apparently, I am the recipient of a house. Four walls in four words. Is their architect the same absentee who speaks these words? Is this the builder? Saying that she has built for me? I do not know the builder's gender, so I will call her she. Of course, I believe myself the addressee – these words are undoubtedly meant for me; that is the conceit of reading and the egotism of being human. But this essay is meant for you. Elaine. Catherine. Caroline. Reader. I shape these words with you in mind. So from now on I will call ðe ‘you’.

In the last paragraph I wrote ‘house’, yet the word bold is really ‘building’: for you was a building built. A tautology. Or an inevitability. How else could a building be? Except by being built? Did you ask to be housed? What did the speaker know, or presume to know, of you, of your life, before she spoke? Before she built?

Four more words. You were dative, but you have become nominative. Then, an object, indirectly. Now, a subject. But a passive subject. The speaker, or if not the speaker then at least the absent builder, built before you were born.