He Walks
Margaret Houston
At night, he walks.
Swirls himself into being
from the ashes in the corner cabinet, while
above, the ranks of milky throbbing stars
alight the firmament.
His soundless feet strike tiles
where echoes of summer grandchildren
hum wordlessly to rigid plastic dolls. The snow
has drifted deep against the window sill,
and a forgotten chickadee
pecks at hardened berries
that shrink against the cold. A few
stalks of Queen Anne’s Lace,
blackened and dry
shed feathered flowers onto snow that
blinks the stars’ light back to empty air.
He sees
the fifteen years’ abandonment, the dust
that seeps into this place
as one by one it empties. In the barn
set against forested hillside, a swallow
has pulled out the stuffing of folded quilts,
and the iron stove in the parlour is cold.
On the hill beyond, the eyes of silent deer,
gold opalescent eyes, blink, and disappear
through snowbound groves of maple and
the silver birch with peeling skin, under
bowing spruce that hide the foxes. He looks at
the rooms he built, the beams he hewed,
here in this place where his rusting tools still lie
across his bench, haphazard, as he left them,
where the little girls he loved have grown and gone
and his wife has waited winter nights in silence,
he walks.
And hears
the echoes of a dozen silent years.