Close

I count the birds at my feeder, watch them arrive only to disappear, they are a happenstance, they flicker in and out, die and return. People overhear other lives, I imagine where they go and why? The flush of a toilet brings visuals as if every wall were an opaque plasma screen. People have died in the close, dead neighbors, three, four, six times removed. The living wait for the mail, stay to become known, remodel a restless silence. Some sit on porches smoking, without seeing I see them the way a mother duck sees her brood behind her back. I'm happy to be inside this close, as if I were a life inside a life, something born each day to be close.