PERMANENT ARRANGEMENT
This vacant house
is too public
its community of mice,
after dark,
dance on the cellar door
for the moon,
or bite new passages
into the earth;
at dawn they return
with pockets full
Exhausted from frost,
the cornfields frail
with harvest, roots
go out like hungry snakes
with swollen tongues;
shudders of rain
mark the road
like heavy boots.