All those who can have turned their windows dark.
Nobody wants to look into the sleepless gaze
of the house where things ran out. I mean to say,
the things that carried him. Or so they said,
who witnessed all that noise, a tea-colored moon
in its biggest, roundest form, a pregnant belly,
and the valley fog gone wandering up the road.
The sound they heard was like a sow, gleeful,
just tucked into corn. The facts, though; I was after those.
They ran and hid. He was wearing green,
they said. A frog-headed bathrobe
and one striped sock. I wondered if they
shook the kid. Or if he wandered off,
though the mother said he could not lift the latch.
She showed me through the gall-swept, widdered room
where I began to believe. What makes shadows
that don’t leave when the living do?
And on the floor beside the bed,
a scrubby stick, two yellow leaves pinned on
like jaundiced eyes. Unblinking, starred.
She couldn’t bear to throw it out.
Evidence, I said. She numbly stroked
the dry face of the wood.
It stared up at the corner of the room.
A hint of breeze. The curtains stirred.