Eviction Notice
They skit it and flit it and in it
it's all dust: of plaster
of a bedroom fire
of coughs the walls catch:
dry coughs of resignation
wet coughs phlegm
I’d thought to wash
when the fever went through
like routine
paperwork.
Not the bats--they’ll hang
until May and babies
but the squirrels, all
winter I feel their grip
on the beams, hear
their fear? elation? rush up
the partition walls
and then back down again
a dry rain.
The only thing keeping
me from seeing them out
right is paper, a wooden frame,
a failing bit
of plaster.
They know me
the way I know them:
by our tramp through
the air
a solid shoe
that cough
an occasional pause.
We are the both of us
too busy to say so much
as a hey--great humid February
we’re having. Hearing me they freeze.
They wait
while I wait.
It’s been a mild month. It’ll be a thousand
and a little more the guy said
to pin the eviction
on them. The guy also said they’ll go out some
one way door. They’ll make noise
about it (I won’t be home
to watch them go--what
compassionate landlord
stands at the edge
of the road and watches them all
march off slumped under their
now where do we go? Only
opening the walls
years later to see the little closets
will tell us what we’ve all lost:
the small spaces between the joists and beams
they got to in a storm
when between the shingles a brief
jag of light. Only imagine them there,
quiet like me,
eyes open in the dark
waiting for it all
to pass over.
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