Those Before Us

They are all outline, uniformly gray, 
unregenerate arrowheads sloughed up the path here, 
or in the corners of the eye, they play 
their thankless, routed roles. They never were. 

Wormwood on the veranda! Plodding needles 
still prod the coarse pink yarn into a dress. 
The muskrat that took a slice of your thumb still huddles, 
a mop of hair and a heartbeat on the porch—

there's the tall wastebasket where it learned to wait 
for us playing dead, the slats it mashed in terror, 
its spoor of cornflakes, and the packing crate 
it furiously slashed to matchwood to escape. 

Their chairs were pulpits, yet if you draw back the blinds 
(as full of windows as a fishnet now), 
you will hear them conspiring, slapping hands 
across the bent card-table, still leaf-green. 

Vacations, stagnant growth. But in the silence, 
someone lets out his belt to breathe, someone 
roams in negligée. Bless the confidence 
of their sitting unguarded there in stocking feet. 

Sands drop from the hour-glass waist and swallow-tail. 
We follow their gun-shy shadows down the trail—
those before us! Pardon them for existing. 
We have stopped watching them. They have stopped watching.