a few days or a week or a month
and it has been empty a day or a week
or a month, I stalk through the rooms
testing lights, opening windows,
and I feel the house test me too, not yet
ungrudging at the creak my feet make.
And this is how I understand my cat,
who when we moved to a new house crouched low,
sniffed the baseboards, then disappeared
under the bed to hide and watch,
but instead I’m stacking books
on the nightstand and arranging
a toothbrush, a glasses case, a days-of-the-week
pill organizer, thinking how
the body, too, is a house, and how
I have at times gone days or weeks
or years absent from it even as I answered
email and buried my dead,
until pausing a minute to look under the bed
I find two scared eyes staring back,
and I call to it the way children and old women
have for generations, standing
in the empty light of open doors.
