It is a dirty business. Looters disguised
as relatives haul boxes out the door,
like soldiers pillaging a secured village,
murderers disposing of the bloody shirt.
Sheet lightning and thunder like the ghosts
of bombs, but no rain cools the stagnant air
through which tools and lamps and ball gloves
make their way into the trunks of cars.
I look for something white to wave—
this calendar from the last good war,
this autographed ball, this sheet music
whose chords are all suspended ninths.
But everything I touch is yellow as the sheets
beneath the pale blue comforter
on this bed whose mattress keeps the shape
of someone now bodiless as a song.
The piano’s keys are yellow, too, their hammers
striking the tense wires softly as the rain
that will not come, catching the apparition of a tune,
then dropping it. There is no one here to hear.
You got lost in a bit of lamp light, your white shirt
yellow against the sky-blue comforter, your ears
full of the sound of your own blood, of water falling,
of tools about their business, of ball meeting glove.
Silence draws itself out where I am, a taut
wire snapped by a slamming door, by the thunder
of someone hammering. Now darkness
begins to sing from each plundered room.
If this were a ball game, it would be the final
inning and, shelled in the eighth, we would be
without comfort with two out and no one on,
and all the runs we’d earned would have been stolen.
Your trunk of uniforms and battle souvenirs
is already gone when someone says, Take whatever
you like. But what? A ball of rain? A lamp
of lightning? This vase filled with thunder?