This house you can see through

from one garden to another, forgotten

if not to yourself, ceilings undetectable

    as air over wide oak floorboards,

Mongolian carpets. This house

   
you can see through, inhabited

by no wind that heightens and dies

at your feet, just the horizon that cuts

    straight through. You’re not touched

by a small hand near the small


of your back, a few starry tops of frost

on the glass where a child

once pressed fingers through his slow,

    important breathing. Roof breathes back

without a creak. Thought of ice


continues to accumulate. You pause

at the table set with vodka to be drunk

among whispers. You’ve been waiting

    so long for an unexpected guest that these rooms

crossed every night are almost too invisible


to trouble you. Your noiseless eye

is a mouth seeing the glass as a river

in which your face falls

    away. You might almost see through

to the place where the light in dreams


comes from, past the Japanese maples

brooding through a gap in the landing,

viewed from where the child slowly turned,

    his life on the window.